Chapter 10
In This Chapter
Demystifying opportunities
Creating new opportunities
Changing opportunity records
Organizing opportunity lists and contact roles
Using Chatter to follow opportunities
Your sales pipeline is the lifeblood of your business. It’s the list of deals that can help you achieve your sales targets. But try as you might, you can probably never close every deal in your pipeline. Things happen: Budgets get slashed, projects get tabled, you lose to a competitor, decision makers change. So, you need enough deals to give yourself the chance to hit and exceed your revenue goals in a given time frame.
An opportunity in Salesforce is a sales deal that you want to track to an ultimate conclusion (ideally, a win). The opportunity record has tools to help you efficiently track and close a sale. By using Salesforce, you can manage more opportunities at the same time and pursue each opportunity with greater precision. For example, if you’re a Salesforce sales rep, you can use opportunities to follow a standard process, link distribution partners, associate products, strategize against competition, record your actions and other notes, and more. And you don’t have to waste precious time updating a pipeline spreadsheet. Instead, you or your manager can generate the current pipeline with the click of a button.
In this chapter, we show you the techniques and best practices for using opportunities to track sales. First, you find out the most reliable way to create opportunities. Then, we discuss how to view them in the manner that makes sense to you. You can also discover how to update your records so that your information is current.
An opportunity record 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:
When naming opportunities, you and your company should define a standard naming convention for the Opportunity Name field so that you can easily search for and distinguish opportunities from a list. We recommend that the opportunity name start with the account name, then a hyphen, and then the name of the customer’s project or the product of primary interest. This naming convention makes for readable reports later.
Before you can begin using Salesforce to close opportunities, first you must get the records into Salesforce. In the following sections, we discuss the best ways to create opportunities so that they link to the correct accounts, contacts, and other records.
The best method for creating a new opportunity is to start from the relevant account or contact record, which guarantees that the opportunity associates to the correct record, making the opportunity easily trackable. And, if you add the opportunity from a contact, you link both the account and the contact at the same time.
To create an opportunity, go to the relevant Account or Contact detail page and follow these steps:
Alternatively, scroll down the detail page to the Opportunities related list and click the New button. The result is the same. The Edit mode of a new opportunity appears; see Figure 10-1. The Account Name field is conveniently filled in for you.
At a minimum, you must complete the required fields. Depending on how you set up your opportunity record, you might have to fill in other required fields, which are highlighted in red. See the section “Getting Familiar with the Opportunity Record,” earlier in this chapter, for more details on common required fields.
The Opportunity detail page appears. You can click the Edit button on this page at any time if you need to modify the record.
If you have the good fortune to need to enter multiple opportunities, one after another, instead of clicking the Save button, click the Save & New button. A new opportunity record appears in Edit mode. You have to fill in the Account Name field, but this technique can save you time.
If you commonly create opportunities that are similar to each other, use the cloning feature to reduce unnecessary retyping. For example, if you’re an account manager who creates work order opportunities for additional purchases from the same customer, you might want to clone an existing record and change the details.
To clone an opportunity, go to the opportunity record that you want to clone and follow these steps:
A new Opportunity Edit page appears, prefilled with all the data from the previous record.
Pay close attention to content in required fields such as Close Date, Stage, and Opportunity Name because the information prefilled in those fields might be incorrect for the new opportunity. Review data in other fields to ensure that the information is applicable to this new opportunity.
An Opportunity detail page for your cloned opportunity appears.
After you add opportunities into Salesforce, you can make changes to your records when deals progress, stall, or fade away. In the following sections, we cover three common practices: editing, sharing, and reassigning.
In the course of working with your opportunities, you inevitably collect information that you want to save directly in the opportunity record. Every time you capture important data on your opportunity, remember to update your record by doing the following:
You can also hover your mouse over the specific field that you want to edit. If a pencil icon appears to the right of the field, double-click the field to edit it. (If you see a padlock icon instead, that means the field is not editable, on purpose. Move along and pick another field to update.)
Alternatively, if you’re already in an account or contact record that’s linked to the opportunity, scroll down to the Opportunities related list and click the Edit link to the left of the desired opportunity. The result is the same. The Opportunity Edit page appears.
Nine out of ten times, those fields play a key role in your company’s sales pipeline reports. By keeping your information up to date, you and other users can get a true measure on the opportunity’s progress.
The opportunity reappears in Saved mode. The fields that you edited are changed.
You can keep track of certain critical updates to your opportunity record by using the Stage History related list. Anytime you or one of your team members who has read-write access to your record modifies the Stage, Probability, Close Date, or Amount fields, you can quickly scan this at the bottom of the opportunity record page to see who modified the record and when. See Chapter 17 for further details on using and customizing opportunity reports.
The opportunity record carries a great deal of quantifiable information about an account, such as how many licenses were sold, the amount of a deal, and so on. By collecting and aggregating key opportunity field information onto an account record, a sales rep can quickly see how valuable a particular customer is by viewing the total number of licenses a customer currently has, how much total revenue a customer has closed with your company, and the highest deal closed with that customer, to name a few examples.
You can aggregate this summary information in two ways:
To create a custom roll-up of your opportunity data onto the account record, choose Setup⇒Build⇒Customize⇒Accounts⇒Fields and follow these steps:
The New Custom Field Wizard opens.
The Field Name field automatically populates itself based on what you enter in the Field Label. In this example, I type Total Deals Closed and click the Next button.
Identifying the summarized object tells Salesforce which records from which objects you want to be combined and summarized onto the account record.
This selection tells Salesforce how you want the field of your choice to be summarized. You can choose a count of records, the sum, the minimum value, or the maximum value. If you choose any of the latter three options, you also have to identify which field in the opportunity you want to be summarized by using the Field to Aggregate picklist to make their choice.
You can filter out certain criteria in your result set.
If you want to summarize only records that meet certain criteria, select the Only Records Meeting Certain Criteria Should Be Included in the Calculation radio button to reveal a set of filter criteria. For example, you may want a sum of all the Amount fields for opportunities in which the Closed status equals True. (Figure 10-2 shows an example of defining the field calculation.)
You might find that after you set up your opportunities in Salesforce, you need to give them to the right people because management has decided to reshuffle sales territories (again). Or your sales teams might be set up in a hunter/farmer configuration, in which you reassign closed opportunities from new business reps to account managers after a certain time has passed.
If you want to reassign an opportunity, open the Opportunity detail page and follow these steps:
The Ownership Edit page appears, as shown in Figure 10-3.
The recipient gets notified of the reassignment via e-mail.
The opportunity record reappears. The Opportunity Owner field has changed to the assigned user.
When you have all or a portion of your opportunities entered in Salesforce, you can begin to organize them to suit the way that you sell.
In the following sections, you can find out how you can use views and other tools from the Opportunities home page to provide greater focus for you and your sales teams. Then, for even more robust organization of your opportunity information, check out Chapter 17 for specifics on how to use standard and custom opportunity reports.
An opportunity view is a list of opportunities that match certain criteria. When you select a view, you’re basically specifying criteria to limit the results that you get back. The advantage of a view, versus searching, is that you can use this view over and over again. For example, if you’re one of many sales reps, you probably want to see only your opportunities. On the Opportunities home page, Salesforce comes preset with several defined views:
Depending on the way that your company has set up your security model, you might not see this view or its results.
To try out a predefined view, do the following:
Depending on how your company has customized the views, you might see all or none of the options in the preceding bulleted list as well as some other choices that might have been created for you.
A list page appears, showing opportunities that you currently own. Salesforce lays out the list with standard columns that correspond to commonly used opportunity fields, plus an Action column so that you can quickly modify a record.
For example, if you click the Close Date header, the list page re-sorts by the close dates entered on your opportunity records.
An Opportunity detail page appears.
The opportunity record appears in Edit mode, and you can make changes to the data.
Click the Save button on the opportunity before navigating away from it.
If you want special lists for the way that you manage your opportunities, you should build custom views. For example, if you want to see only open opportunities closing this month at or above 50 percent, you can create a view that helps you focus on just that part of the pipeline.
To build a view from scratch, follow these simple steps:
The Create New View page appears.
In the example used in the preceding section, you might call the view Closing This Month >= 50%.
A basic criteria query is made up of three elements:
Although the preset views in Salesforce display common fields, such as Stage and Amount, you can select up to 15 opportunity fields to display on your custom view page.
Your decision is simple if you don’t see the Visibility step. Otherwise, select the appropriate option, depending on whether you want to share your view with others. Your options are basically all, none, or limited. If you choose limited accessibility, use the Available for Sharing and Shared To list boxes to select which users can see the view.
A new view appears, based on your custom view criteria. If you don’t get all the results you anticipate, you might want to recheck and refine the search criteria.
Depending on your sales process, at some early point, you need to identify the decision makers who’ll influence the buying decision. Contacts and their titles often don’t tell the whole story about decision makers, influencers, and the chain of command within an opportunity.
To better define the buying influences on an opportunity, go to an opportunity record and follow these steps:
The Contact Roles page appears for that specific opportunity, displaying a list of the available contacts linked to the related account. See Figure 10-4.
Salesforce comes preconfigured with a standard list of contact roles, but your company can customize this drop-down list if you need to modify the list of values. You don’t have to classify a role for every contact on the list; you can just leave the Role default value of None.
If the right role for your contact doesn’t appear, advise your system administrator to customize the Opportunity Contract Role Picklist Values.
The primary contact typically refers to the person who’s currently your point of contact. One of the benefits of selecting a primary contact is that you can list who the primary contact is on a basic opportunity report.
If you work with multitier selling models or if you collaborate with business partners on your deals, use contact roles to add contacts who aren’t employees of an account. For example, if your customer’s legal gatekeeper works for an outside law firm, you can use the Contact Roles related list to highlight the attorney’s role.
The Opportunity detail page reappears, and your Contact Roles related list is updated to reflect contacts involved in the opportunity. If you need to add more contact roles, click the New button in the Contact Roles related list again.
If you work as part of a sales team or just have a lot of deals to keep track of, Salesforce can bring you the news on your opportunities as it happens. You are automatically set to follow updates on any opportunity you create, but sometimes, you don’t want to hunt down what’s happening on someone else’s opportunity.
You can follow an Opportunity record by following these steps:
The Opportunity detail page appears, displaying the Chatter feed front and center, as shown in Figure 10-5.
For more information on how to use Chatter, see Chapter 6.
The Opportunity page updates to show a thumbnail photo of your profile picture under the Followers section, alongside photos of other people following this record. The Follow button now appears as a Following status, with a gray “x” next to it that you click if you want to unfollow the record.
Now when there’s Chatter activity on this opportunity, it appears in your Chatter feed displayed on your home page too.