The opportunity object contains the information for every deal you’re tracking, such as
deal size and expected close date. The opportunity object is at the core of your sales process. By
managing it correctly, you’ll get the most value from your investment in Sales force CRM.
To gain visibility into your pipeline, you need to make sure that your reps diligently track their deals and
update the opportunity fields with accurate information. This process makes everyone’s life easier. Sales
managers will be able to see how the sales organization is performing in real time, and the sales reps
won’t have to spend hours putting together reports and sales projections. Updating the opportunity object
is so important that many organizations insist that, “If it isn’t in Sales force, it doesn’t exist.”
Opportunity Line Item: These are the Products which are associated to an Opportunity.
A company can have a number of products which it sells. All these products are generalized as Products. However, when a Product, or a number of Products are attached to an Opportunity, then they are called "Opportunity Line Item" records.
The $ value attached to an Opportunity comes from the Products associated with that particular opportunity as each Product (or Opportunity Line Item) has a $ value associated to it.
Set Standards for Salesforce.com Opportunity Creation:
The key is – how should your business define an Opportunity, and when should we convert a Lead into one? Well, this will differ for every business, and will depend largely on your sales cycle, as well s your customer’s buying cycles.
One of the recommendations we give to our clients is to have a fairly rigorous standard for Opportunity conversion. While we want to move Leads out of the Lead category fairly soon, we don’t have to create an Opportunity. They can simply become Accounts and Contacts, with the potential to create an Opportunity at a later date. At a minimum, an Opportunity needs to have the following (our rules – not Salesforce.com’s): A projected Close date; a projected amount of revenue; Competitors being considered for the project; the final decision maker; the business challenge being solved.
Our advice to companies that we work with, is that your sales person should only create an Opportunity once they can provide some key detail around these 5 areas. If they can’t then they really should be going back and qualifying some more.
Sales force: Opportunity Record:
An opportunity record in Sales force is the collection of fields that make up the information on a deal you’re tracking. The record has only two modes: In Edit mode, you modify fields; in View mode, you view the fields and the opportunity’s related lists.
An opportunity record comes preconfigured with several standard fields. Most of these fields are self-explanatory, but be sure to pay attention to these critical ones:
- Amount: This field displays the intended, best-guess amount of the sale. Depending on the way your company calculates the pipeline report, you might use numbers that include total contract value, the bookings amount, and so on.
- Close Date: Use this required field for your best guess as to when you’ll close this deal. Depending on your company’s sales process, the close date has different definitions, but this field is commonly used to track the date that you signed all the paperwork required to book the sale.
- Expected Revenue: This read-only field is automatically generated by multiplying the Amount field by the Probability field.
- Forecast Category: This field is typically hidden, but every opportunity automatically includes a value. Each sales stage within the Stage drop-down list corresponds to a default forecast category so that higher-probability opportunities contribute to your overall forecast after they reach certain stages.
- Opportunity Owner: This person in your organization owns the opportunity. Although an opportunity record has only one owner, many users can still collaborate on an opportunity.
- Opportunity Name: This required text field represents the name of the specific deal as you want it to appear on your list of opportunities or on a pipeline report.
- Private: If you want to keep an opportunity private, select this check box to render the record accessible to only you, your bosses, and the system administrator. This field isn’t available in Team Edition.
- Probability: The probability is the confidence factor associated with the likelihood that you’ll win the opportunity. Each sales stage that your company defines is associated with a default probability to close. Typically, you don’t need to edit this field; it gets assigned automatically by the Stage option that you pick. In fact, your administrator might remove write access from this field altogether.
- Stage: This required field allows you to track your opportunities, following your company’s established sales process. Salesforce provides a set of standard drop-down list values common to solution selling, but your system administrator can modify these values.
- Type: Use this drop-down list to differentiate the types of opportunities that you want to track. Most customers use the Type drop-down list to measure new versus existing business and products versus services, but your system administrator can modify it to measure other important or more specific deal types, such as add-ons, upsells, work orders, and so on.
If you add many fields, you might make the opportunity record harder to use, which then puts user adoption of Salesforce at risk. At the same time, you’ll have greater success with opportunities when you can easily capture what you want to track.
