Displaying & Adding Opportunities

Clicking on Start > Sales > Opportunities displays the Opportunities Landing Page.

The Opportunities Landing Page displays a choice of views including:

• My Opportunities – a subset of the All Opportunities view showing a list of those Opportunities that are either assigned to you or that have been marked to appear in your My Opportunities view.
• All Opportunities – all the Opportunities on your database.

In addition, there are several system generated views based on when the Opportunity is due to close. It is possible to display this as a Calendar so that you can see a high-level view of all your Opportunity data. For more information on Calendar Views, see here. 

You can customise the appearance of this (and any other) Landing Page including grouping, filtering and saving a default view. For more information on customising views click here. To open any of the records displayed in the views above, hover over the row until it becomes underlined and click on it.

Adding Opportunities

You can create a new Opportunity in the following ways:

• Convert an existing Lead. This method will automatically link the Person and the Organisation in the Lead with the Opportunity.
• Open the Organisation or Person record for the prospective customer, then open the Opportunity tab and click New Opportunity. This method will automatically link the prospective customer (which can be a Person or an Organisation) to the Opportunity.
• Click Start > Sales > Opportunities > New Opportunity. 
• Click Start > New > Opportunity. 
• Open an existing Transaction Document, click Copy Record and choose Create Opportunity. If you use this option, remember to update all the appropriate fields and amend the items in the Related Items tab to ensure the correct relationships are recorded.

Opportunity Fields

Own Organisation

If you have more than one Own Organisation, make sure you choose the correct one using the dropdown at the top of the screen next to Own Organisation.  

Currency

If your Own Organisation trades in more than one currency, make sure the correct one is selected from the dropdown at the top of the screen next to Currency.

Prospective Customer 

If you created the Opportunity from the Opportunity record, this field will already be populated. Otherwise, start typing the name in and select the right Organisation or Person from the list that appears, or click on the binocular symbol to look up the right Organisation or Person in the dialogue box that appears.

Close Date

Enter the date that you anticipate the sale will close. As the Opportunity progresses, you may need to amend this date.

Stage

Although this field is not compulsory, it is important to enter the correct Opportunity Stage, as this will impact upon reports and sales forecasts. Generally, an Opportunity moves forward from one stage to the next (possibly ‘skipping’ stages) until it is either Won or Lost. 

To downgrade an Opportunity stage, a user must have the ‘Downgrade Opportunity to Previous Stage’ capability. (By default this capability is automatically given to users in the following groups: System Administration, Sales Administration, Sales Managers and Sales People, but it can be removed by your System Administrator if required.)

Probability

Depending on how your database has been configured, this field might be auto-populated (based on the Opportunity Stage entered). However, you can use the dropdown picklist to enter another percentage if applicable.

Type

Use this field to classify whether this is New or Existing Business.

Source

This field records the source of the Opportunity.

Campaign

If the Opportunity was generated as a result of a particular Campaign, you can specify which one here. This will link the Opportunity to that Campaign making it easier to track the success metrics of you Marketing Campaigns.