Opportunitymanagement involves the creation and management of a sales opportunityand its associated quotes through the lifecycle of the opportunityuntil the opportunity is either won or lost. Opportunity managementuses the Opportunity Fulfillment pipeline in Process Modeling to sendan opportunity through its various stages such as creation and negotiationand track the opportunity's lifecycle.

A sales opportunity can be created in two ways:

• A customer may contact a Field Sales Representativeand ask for a quote resulting in the creation of an opportunity.
• A Field Sales Representative may see a potentialsales opportunity and create an opportunity for a customer.

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

A customer contact is generally associated withan opportunity. However when a customer contact is not availablea contact address is used in the opportunity record.

After an opportunity is created the Field SalesRepresentative creates one or more quotes for this opportunity andpresents these quotes to the customer. If the customer accepts oneof the quotes an order is created from that quote all the alternativequotes are abandoned and the opportunity moves to the Won status.If the quotes expire or the customer does not want to negotiate onthe quotes anymore the quotes are abandoned and the Field Sales Representativemay manually move the opportunity to the Lost status. If the opportunityis lost the Field Sales Representative can specify the reason whythe opportunity was lost.

Whenan opportunity is moved to either the Won status or the Lost statusthe opportunity purge agent verifies that all the associated quoteshave been purged and then purges the opportunity.