Each opportunity record represents a potential sale for your company, together opportunities form your sales pipeline, a collective representation of business deals your sales team is working to close. Being able to visualize your pipeline allows you to track income and make intelligent forecasts on future revenue.
Building, organizing and visualizing your sales pipeline is crucial if your sales teams are to maximize their potential, fortunately CRM.me provides all the necessary tools to make sure that is easy to do.
Getting Started
Create an Opportunity by navigating to the Opportunities module in the module list located on the left side of your CRM.me instance. You may also use the "Create " drop down menu located in the top menu. Opportunities can be linked to an Account with CRM.me.
Staying Organized
Once created, Opportunities can be viewed in a List view or Kanban view. Perform Advanced searches or add/remove Columns to sort and organize Opportunities. For more information on the Kanban view for Opportunities please see our article, Visualizing Opportunities with Kanban.
Stages of an Opportunity
Every sales deal goes through stages, by default CRM.me comes with some suggested sales stages of Prospecting, Qualification, Negotiating, Verbal, Closed Won and Closed Lost.
Of course these are just to get you started, your CRM administrator can add, remove or reorder the sales stages to fit your business using Designer. Each stage can also be allocated it's own probability of closure percentage which is again customizable.
Time in Stage
Curious how long an Opportunity has been in a particular Stage? CRM.me allows the ability to track how long an Opportunity has been in a particular stage. By default the "Time in Stage" can be seen when viewing an Opportunity records detail or when visualizing opportunities on the kanban. You can also display this by default elsewhere in the app, why not ask your CRM admin to add this to the default columns when you search for opportunities.
Remember: The Time in Stage counter shows how long the opportunity has been in it's current stage. Each time the stage changes the counter starts over again.
Opportunity Detail View
Kanban View
Opportunity Rot
A potential sale is similar to fresh produce, if forgotten about it will go bad. The Opportunity Rot feature allows you to take notice of potential sales that have been idling for too long.
When enabled you may set a number of days that it is acceptable for an opportunity to remain in a particular stage. Red or green visual indicators will then appear beside the Time in stage value wherever it appears.
Those opportunities that are considered healthy will show a green light while those that have exceeded the maximum number of days allowed will show a red light indicating that they need attention. Leaving the threshold for a stage as 0 effectively disables the visual indicator for that stage.
To enable this feature head over to the Designer > Opportunities > General.
Opportunity List View
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