Driving the Sales Cycle with Opportunities

Opportunities are the foundation of sales and drive growth for any business. Working on an opportunity involves moving from one stage to the next as you get closer to closing a deal. This is referred to as a pipeline or funnel in some organizations, because you usually have more opportunities in the earlier stages of a deal—the top of the funnel—and fewer opportunities in the later stages—the bottom of the funnel. Each stage is tied to a percentage likelihood of closing the opportunity. These percentages tie into the forecasting of future sales.

The following topics are discussed in this chapter:

• Introducing opportunities
• Understanding opportunity stages
• Adding contact roles for opportunities
• Organizing products and price books
• Creating quotes
• Determining forecasts

With the help of these topics, you will be able to develop the required skills to create an opportunity...

Technical requirements

To follow along with this chapter, make sure you log in to your development org. You will need to enable Quotes from the Setup menu in order to generate quotes for the Creating quotes section of this chapter, and also enable Forecasts from the Setup menu in order to view forecasts for the Determining forecasts section.

Understanding opportunities

Opportunities are the main component of your sales pipeline. Within the sales cycle, once you convert a lead—as we saw in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads—all of your interactions for the sale take place in the Opportunity section.

There are many components to opportunities that drive the overall sales cycle, from initially working the opportunity to forecasting future sales for the management of your sales. We will see how opportunities work by using a business use case.

Business use case

As a sales rep for XYZ Widgets, you have been corresponding with GenePoint, the account you created in Chapter 4, Business Development with Accounts and Contacts. Your conversations have been going well and the customer asks you to send a quote. You now have to create an opportunity, add products, and create and send a quote. After this, you will see the opportunity in your sales forecast for the month and will finally be able to close...

Further reading

• Accounts and contacts for the Lightning experience: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/accounts_contacts_lightning_experience

Adding contact roles for opportunities

Contact roles refer to people you communicate with to close a specific deal. You could have one or more contact roles, depending on the opportunity. First, let’s look at how to add new contact roles that may not be on the default list. To do this, navigate to the setup and configuration section of Salesforce:

Figure 5.9: Navigating to the button to create a contact role for an opportunity

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, there are several steps to follow if you want to add or edit the roles that come up when adding a contact role:

1. Go to Home (1) | Feature Settings (2) | Sales (3) | Contact Roles on Opportunities (4).
2. On this page, click on New (5) to add a new contact role or edit any existing roles.

Now that we have seen how to add roles as needed, let’s add an actual role:

1. Navigate to the Contact Roles section of the opportunity to add a contact role, as in the following...

Organizing products and price books

Price books are a collection of products that can be added to an opportunity to show what is purchased. An opportunity can only be tied to one price book. Price books are created by administrators and assigned to specific teams that sell a specific product line. Salesforce automatically creates a Standard price book as a master list of all the products and default prices. It is best practice to create multiple custom price books that contain the list prices if you offer products at different prices to different market segments.

Products are the actual items within a price book that are sold. Let's see how they work by taking the following steps:

1. Click on Add Products, as in the following screenshot, to add a product, or multiple products, to an opportunity. Notice that you also have the option here to choose a price book for this particular opportunity if you have access to more than one price book. If you only have access to one price book, it...

Creating quotes

Quotes are an integral part of the sales process and allow you to send pricing details to your clients. You can create multiple quotes as you work to close a deal. In this section we will see how to create quotes.

The following screenshot shows you how to create a quote from an opportunity:

Figure 5.18: Option for creating a quote from the Quotes section of the opportunity page

Navigate to the Quotes section of the Opportunity and click on New Quote. The following screenshot shows the quote creation page:

Figure 5.19: Fields found on the New Quote page

Then, fill in the Expiration Date field for the quote and set Status to Approved so that the quote can be used.

The following screenshot shows you how to generate a PDF of the quote by choosing Create PDF from the drop-down menu. Creating a PDF of the quote makes it easy to share the quote with a client:

Figure 5.20: Option to create a quote PDF from the top-right drop-down menu

The following screenshot shows you how...

Determining forecasts

Forecasting allows sales managers to predict how much income is projected for a specific time period. Each opportunity stage has a probability that ties into the forecast categories. Salesforce defines the forecast categories as follows:

• Best Case includes the amount you are likely to close, closed-won opportunities, and opportunities in the Commit category.
• Closed includes the total for closed-won opportunities.
• Commit includes the amount you are fairly sure you will close.
• Omitted means the opportunity does not contribute to your forecast.
• Pipeline includes all open opportunities.

The following screenshot shows you how the forecast looks for the GenePoint deal, which is in the Prospecting stage. To get to this page, I navigated to the Forecasts tab:

Figure 5.22: Finding forecast details from the Forecasts tab

The deal shows up in the Pipeline category since it is not yet closed and is in a lower Prospecting stage. The Prospecting stage is the default stage...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned what opportunities are and how to create them. We discovered the different opportunity stages and how they are used with the sales path to record the progress of an opportunity. We also understood what contact roles are and how to add them to an opportunity. Then, we looked at products and price books, and how to add products to an opportunity so that we can show what is being sold. We also learned how to create and generate a quote PDF. Finally, we worked with forecasts and observed how opportunities tie into forecasting.

In the next chapter, we will cover campaigns—the foundation of marketing functionality in Salesforce.

Questions

1. How many opportunities can you have on an account?
2. What is the difference between the opportunity stages and the sales path?
3. How many Contact Role instances can be added to an opportunity?
4. What happens to the Amount field on an opportunity when you add products?
5. Who do you send quotes to in an opportunity?
6. What are the two types of Closed stages in an opportunity?
7. What is included under the Best Case forecast category?

Further reading

• Salesforce opportunities : https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=opportunities.htm&type=5
• Salesforce forecasting: https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=forecasts3_overview.htm&type=5