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 and how to use Chatter to follow opportunities.

Getting Familiar with the Opportunity Record

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:

• 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.

  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 on.

• 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.
• 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.

When customizing your opportunity fields, take into consideration the patience and attention spans of your end-users. Keep the record as simple as possible to ensure that all your important fields actually get filled in. 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.

Entering Opportunities

Before you can begin using Salesforce to close opportunities, first you must get the records into Salesforce. 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:

1. Select the Create Opportunity option from the Create New drop-down list on the sidebar.

   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.

2. Fill in the fields as much as you can or as required.

   At a minimum, you must complete the required fields. Depending on how you set up your opportunity record, you might have to fill in additional required fields, all of 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.

3. Click Save when you’re done.

   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 your company has legacy databases that contain deal information and you want this data to be in Salesforce as opportunities, you can’t use an import wizard to migrate your records like you can with leads, accounts, and contacts. If this is a current challenge, seek out your technical staff, system administrator, Salesforce rep, or a Salesforce consultant. With business guidance, a person with the technical know-how can use the Apex Data Loader to import opportunities and other records into Salesforce, which can help you avoid wasting time manually re-inputting opportunities. See Chapter 22 for additional tips and tricks on migrating data.

Modifying Opportunity Records

After you add opportunities to 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.

Rolling up opportunity data onto the account record

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:

• You can run a report that summarizes this information for you. (See Chapter 23 for more details on creating reports.)
• Your Salesforce administrator can choose which opportunity fields you want to have summarized automatically on the account record.

To create a custom roll-up of your opportunity data onto the account record, choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize ⇒ Accounts ⇒ Fields and then follow these steps:

1. In the Account Custom Fields and Relationships section, click the New button.

   The New Custom Field Wizard opens.

2. Select the Roll-Up Summary radio button and click Next.

3. Enter the name of what you’re summarizing in the Field Label field and click Next.

   The Field Name field automatically populates itself based on what you enter in the Field Label. In this example, we typed Total Deals Closed, hit the Tab key to populate the Field Name, and then clicked the Next button.

4. At the Define the Summary Calculation step, from the Summarized Object picklist, select Opportunities.

   Identifying the summarized object tells Salesforce which records from which objects you want to be combined and summarized onto the account record.

5. Select the roll-up type from the selection of radio buttons in the Select Roll-Up Type section in the middle of the page, and then click Next.

   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.)

6. Select which profiles should be able to view the new field and click Next.
7. Select on which page layout(s) the field should be displayed and click Save.

Organizing Your Opportunities

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 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 23 for specifics on how to use standard and custom opportunity reports.

Defining contact roles

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:

1. Click the New button on the Contact Roles related list.

   The Contact Roles page appears for that specific opportunity, displaying a list of the available contacts linked to the related account (see Figure 10-3).

2. For each relevant contact, use the Role drop-down list to select the appropriate role.

   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.

3. Select a radio button to designate the primary contact.

   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.

4. (Optional) Click the Lookup icon to the right of empty fields in the Contact column to add other contacts who are critical to your opportunity.

   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.

5. When you’re done, click Save.

   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.

Using opportunity teams

Depending on how you do business, you can identify opportunity teams so that all members working a deal can access the same record. An opportunity team is a set of users in your Salesforce instance that can collaborate on a single opportunity. You can also create default opportunity teams if, for example, you typically work on deals with the same account manager and presales representative from your territory.

To enable opportunity teams, choose Setup ⇒ Build ⇒ Customize ⇒ Opportunities ⇒ Opportunity Teams ⇒ Opportunity Team Settings and click the Enable Team Selling check box, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Now you’ll see the page layout selection page, where you can select any and all opportunity layouts to which you can add the Opportunity Team related list.

Associating an opportunity team to your opportunity

Now that you have opportunity teams enabled for your organization, you can create default opportunity teams or just create an ad hoc team and associate it with the opportunity you’re working on.

To create a default opportunity team that you typically work with, click your name in the upper right of any Salesforce page and choose My Settings. Then follow these steps:

1. In the My Settings menu on the left, select Advanced User Details.

   The Advanced User Details page appears, with information about your profile.

2. Scroll down to Default Opportunity Team and click Add.

   The Add Members page appears, where you can select the users you want to add to your default team, their level of access to the opportunity, and their team role, as shown in Figure 10-5.

   You can choose to automatically add the default team to any opportunities you create or are reassigned to by selecting the corresponding check box on the Add Members page.

3. Click Save when you’re done.

   The Advanced User Details page reappears with your default opportunity team.

To associate your default team to an opportunity, navigate to the opportunity record you own, scroll down to the Opportunity Team related list, and click Add Default Team.

If you don’t have a default team, or just want to associate other users to the opportunity, click the Add button on the Opportunity Team related list, and select the users, roles, and level of access there.

Following Opportunities with Chatter

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:

1. From the Opportunity home page, click a recently viewed opportunity.

   The Opportunity detail page appears, displaying the Chatter feed front and center, as shown in Figure 10-6.

   For more information on how to use Chatter, see Chapter 6.

2. To follow the discussion on this opportunity, click the Follow link with the green circled plus sign.

   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.