Overview of opportunity management

Opportunity management involves the creation and management of a sales opportunity and its associated quotes through the lifecycle of the opportunity, until the opportunity is either won or lost.

Opportunity management uses the Opportunity Fulfillment pipeline in Process Modeling to send an opportunity through its various stages, such as creation and negotiation, and track the opportunity’s lifecycle.

A sales opportunity can be created in two ways:

A customer may contact a Field Sales Representative and ask for a quote, resulting in the creation of an opportunity.
A Field Sales Representative may see a potential sales opportunity, and create an opportunity for a customer.

When an opportunity is created, it can either be assigned directly to one or more Field Sales Representatives, or can be temporarily assigned to a team until a Field Sales Representative is assigned to it. The origin of the lead can be specified in the opportunity; for example, a Field Sales Representative can specify the origin of the lead as Trade Show, Call Center, or Customer Call. In addition, a Field Sales Representative can add notes to the opportunity, and associate a note reason for each note that is added.

Note: Codes for note reasons and codes for origin of leads can be configured in the Applications Manager.

A customer contact is generally associated with an opportunity. However, when a customer contact is not available, a contact address is used in the opportunity record.

After an opportunity is created, the Field Sales Representative creates one or more quotes for this opportunity, and presents these quotes to the customer. If the customer accepts one of the quotes, an order is created from that quote, all the alternative quotes are abandoned, and the opportunity moves to the Won status. If the quotes expire or the customer does not want to negotiate on the quotes anymore, the quotes are abandoned and the Field Sales Representative may manually move the opportunity to the Lost status. If the opportunity is lost, the Field Sales Representative can specify the reason why the opportunity was lost.

When an opportunity is moved to either the Won status or the Lost status, the opportunity purge agent verifies that all the associated quotes have been purged, and then purges the opportunity.