Opportunities drive the sales process. All your prospecting and sales activities should lead to an opportunity where you will gather all the information for a potential sale.
An opportunity would typically be added by sales representatives who see that a customer is ready to buy a product. Here you can track customer needs, qualify their budget, add their stakeholders and competition, if applicable, and then propose a product and a price.
- In the Account record, select the Opportunities tab and then click the + icon.
- Enter the required information:
Name - This might be a combination of the account name and the proposed product name.
Contact – Who is the primary contact for this opportunity? You can pick from the list of contacts on the account or create a new one. Note this is a required field. This contact may not be the same as the Primary Contact for the account.
Source – Pick the source for this opportunity from the drop-down list.
Source Details – Provide further details about the source of the opportunity.
- Click Save. The Opportunity pane opens to the Summary tab that presents many more information fields to fill.
The Opportunity Record
The opportunity page is your main record showing the opportunity step and tracking all related information. Gain more understanding about the progression of an opportunity in Learn the Steps of the Opportunity Process.
You will also see the following tabs with fields where you can add more detail. Information and calculations may automatically appear in some of these fields.
Summary – shows summary information about the opportunity.
Timeline – shows all the activities related to opportunities on the account, both active and closed activities. Whenever an account is entered into an activity field, it will be captured here. You can also add miscellaneous notes. You can open, edit, and assign them from this screen.
Business Impact - An area to capture notes on the impact of your product on the company’s situation. This is where you can add more information about Current Situation, Customer Need and New Reality.
Products and Services - Add a Product (or Service) to an Opportunity to populate the record with pricing information if estimates have not already been provided. You can only add a product in the Product tab and services in the Services tab. You could have a product/service under each tab.
Stakeholders - A list of contacts you can add that are stakeholders for this opportunity, otherwise known as the buying group. The Primary Contact of the opportunity will automatically become a Stakeholder. Usually there is more than one person involved in the buying process. Learn who’s who and document it in this section.
Stakeholders also have a connection role. This configurable field might be a choice of Decision-maker, Executive Sponsor, Champion, etc. Note also that a default role can be selected in the configuration. It can be easily changed when you add the stakeholder.
There is also a section for Competitors. It is likely that the customer is also considering alternative solutions. Find out who you are competing against and document it in this section.
Velocity - Shows you a dashboard indicating how long the opportunity spent in the Discover stage and how many times the customer has emailed you, both indicators of deal health.
A good sale will move quickly, spending little time in the Discover stage. Knowing how often a customer emails demonstrates how engaged they are in the opportunity.
The dashboard also shows the total age of the opportunity and the date of the last engagement.
Related – Gives you access to opportunity-related Activities, Documents, Projects and Audit History which presents a full list of changes made to the account including the date, time, and user who made the changes.