Moving Opportunities through the Sales Pipeline
You can use opportunities to keep track of your sales team's efforts towards closing your deals and how long it takes from start to finish. In this document, we will review the process of taking a new lead through the process of an opportunity, to a proposal, to sales.
Often, when a lead first comes into the system, they can start as a new contact without a company associated. You can assign a lead status to a contact, but it isn't required. The contact will show up in the Lead Status Report.
Adding a company to the contact allows you to start adding opportunities for potential orders for your new contact and company. You can create opportunities for any type of product. One of the required fields for opportunities is assigning a Confidence Level. This lets you know at a glance how likely the opportunity is to be converted into an actual sale.
Once the opportunity is in the system, your team can start associating sales activities to the opportunity to keep track of what they are doing to close the deal (calls, text, emails, etc.). On the contact and company’s Activities tab, you’ll see the Opportunity Name associated with the activities, when applicable. The contact will also show up in the Lead Status Report with a status of Forecast Created.
You can see all of that activity on the Forecast Details Report by clicking on the view activity.
If the sale is no longer valid, the user can delete the opportunity or can tie the opportunity to a forecast of 0% or lost, depending on your company's preferences.
If a customer is ready for the next step, the rep can assign the opportunity to either an order or proposal. Adding the opportunity to an order/proposal will 'close' out the opportunity and the sales numbers will show in the order details section of the Forecast Details Report and the pending row of the Forecast Summary Report. The contact will show up in the Lead Status Report with a status of Order Created.
If an order is no longer valid, users can delete it and track the reasons why. The lost reasons will show in the Lost Sales Report.
When an order is sold, the values will no longer show in the Forecast Details Report but instead in the booked and confirmed sales numbers on reports. The contact will show up in the Lead Status Report with a status of Sold!
Updated 10/18/2022