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About Opportunities and Forecasts

An opportunity is a potential revenue-generating transaction that is included in your sales forecast when it reaches a specific point in your sales process. You can create an opportunity by converting a qualified lead to an opportunity or you can create a new opportunity for an existing account or contact.

Opportunity records help you to manage your sales pipeline as you work to close deals. All of your opportunity information is visible in one place and is linked to related lead, contact, and account information. This information gives you a complete picture of your opportunity and your customer.

Tips for Managing Your Opportunity Records

Updating your opportunity information as you work to close a deal facilitates clear team communication and ensures accurate forecasts and reports. It is particularly important to keep certain fields on the Opportunity Detail page up to date:

  • The Revenue, Close Date, and Sales Stage fields are critical for tracking pipeline history and are used for trend analyses.
  • If your company bases its forecasts on opportunities, select the Forecast check box on an opportunity record to add the opportunity to your forecast at the appropriate time in the sales process. If your company bases its forecasts on products, select the Forecast check box on your linked products instead.

Sales Stages

Every sales process is defined by specific stages. Each sales stage has certain activities and deliverables, or tasks that must be completed before the opportunity is advanced to the next sales stage. As you work on an opportunity, you evaluate it against clearly defined criteria for each stage in your company's sales cycle.

  • As criteria are met, update the Sales Stage field in your opportunity record.
  • The Probability percentage field on the opportunity record defaults to a value related to the selected Sales Stage for the opportunity. You can change this value, if needed, to better reflect your particular opportunity while it is in that Sales Stage. However, when the Sales Stage changes, the value in the Probability field again defaults to the value related to the new Sales Stage.
  • The Expected Revenue field displays a currency value that is calculated based on the Revenue field multiplied by the value in the Probability percentage field. This figure is used for forecasting.
  • Update the Next Step field to reflect the criteria for the next stage in the sales cycle.

Forecasting

When the application generates forecasts, it determines which records, fields, and data to include according to your forecasting method. If certain conditions are met, it includes those records in the forecasts:

  1. Close Date. The application verifies that the Close Date for the opportunity record falls within this quarter.

    Whether forecasts are based on product revenue or opportunity revenue, the opportunity record (either alone or linked to products) must show a close date that falls within the quarter. For example, an opportunity with a close date of March 1 is in the Q1 forecast.

  2. Expected Revenue, Pipeline. The application calculates the Expected Revenue and Pipeline forecast data.
    • Calculates the total for the Expected Revenue fields in either the opportunity or product revenue records and displays the sum in the Expected Revenue field in the Forecast record.

      NOTE: For the Expected Revenue to accurately reflect expected revenue based on opportunity products, the user must click the Update Opportunity Totals button. This functionality is only available if the Product Probability Averaging Enabled option is enabled on the company profile.

    • Calculates the total for the Revenue fields in either the opportunity or product revenue records and displays the sum in the Pipeline field in the Forecast record.

      NOTE: For products, only the revenue amount that pertains to that time period is included, not the total product revenue.

  3. Forecast. The application retrieves the Revenue field data from records with the Forecast check box selected and displays the sum in the Forecast field in the Forecast record:
    • If your company bases its forecasts on opportunities, records with the Forecast check box selected on the Opportunity Edit page are included.
    • If your company bases its forecasts on products, records with the Forecast check box selected on the Product Revenue Edit page are included.
    • The application ignores the values in records without the Forecast check box selected.
  4. Closed Revenue. For opportunity records with a Sales Stage of Closed-Won, the application retrieves the Revenue field data from these records and displays the total in the Closed Revenue field of the Forecast record:
    • If your company bases its forecasts on opportunities, records with the Forecast check box selected on the Opportunity Edit page are included.
    • If your company bases its forecasts on products, records with the Forecast check box selected on the Product Revenue Edit page are included.

      NOTE: For products, only the revenue amount that pertains to that time period is included in the Closed Revenue field, not the total product revenue.

    • The application ignores the values in records without the Forecast check box selected.

Published 05/11/2007