Opportunities are how you manage your deal pipeline, tracking a potential piece of business with an account through a series of stages until it is won or lost. Each stage is tied to a probability, and the early stages double as your telemarketing and prospecting workflow.
The Opportunities Index
Navigate to CRM → Opportunities. The index lists opportunities and can be viewed as My Opportunities or All Opportunities. Tabs across the top filter by stage, and the Reports menu provides the Opportunity Details report.
Stages and Probability
An opportunity progresses through a defined set of stages, each linked to a Probability %: Suspect, Qualified, Prospect, Proposal, Negotiation, Verbal, and finally Won or Lost. Advancing the stage updates the probability of the opportunity closing.
Prospecting Stages and Account Status
The first three stages — Suspect, Qualified and Prospect — are essentially telemarketing and prospecting stages. They correlate with the status on the linked CRM Account, which sits as a prospecting status until the account becomes a Customer.
Qualifying an Opportunity
Transitioning an opportunity to Qualified prompts you to enter an ABN. The field is not mandatory, but the step exists to confirm the business exists and is a registered entity — qualifying the lead before further effort is spent on it.
Managing an Opportunity
From the opportunities index, expand an opportunity to reveal its controls. You can Transition to the next stage, Pause it, Change Assignee, or Edit Opportunity. The status can also be changed from the toolbar within the opportunity's own record.
Generating a Deal
When an opportunity is progressing towards a sale, use the Generate Deal button to create a Deal in the Sales application directly from it. The deal carries the account through to pricing and fulfilment. See Sales - Creating a Deal.
Activities and Tasks
Tasks, Activities and Comments can be attributed to an opportunity, and they keep their context — an activity or task created from within an opportunity is visible both in the top-level Activities and Tasks indexes and from within the opportunity itself. If a Task or Activity was logged against the account but should sit against the opportunity, you can link the existing Task or Activity to the opportunity rather than recreating it. Use activities and tasks to track what has been done and what needs to happen to progress the opportunity to its next stage.
The Opportunity Details Report
The Opportunity Details report, available from the Reports menu, shows how opportunities are progressing over 30, 60 and 90 days. A range of filter options lets you narrow the list down to the opportunities you want to review.