Opportunity Management – a matter of changing role

As your company grows, your sales team grows with it, and you quickly discover the need to organize your sales processes. When you have many sales people, software can help you enforce your business's best practices and sales processes, making sure you convert opportunities to cash.

As a sales manager, you'll want to have an overview of how your sales people are doing in terms of converting opportunities to actual sales. You’ll want to know why some sales people are closing more opportunities, and how your pipeline looks.

In Dynamics 365 for Financials, the Sales and Relationship Manager role center is where to go to get this overview, and dig deeper into detail. To access the role center, go to My Settings, and choose it. For more on changing your role center. For more on changing your role center, check this help topic.

Having this data at your fingertips is great and it looks great in evaluation company, but your sales process may be different.Can you tailor this to suit your needs?

Tailor Sales Cycles to match your Sales processes

Glad that you asked. Opportunity Management in Financials is driven by sales cycles. Sales cycles represent different sales processes that a typical opportunity will go through, for both for potential and existing customers. For a quick and easy start, I'd recommend that you prepare two basic sales cycles (or, sales processes): one for new potential customers, and another for existing customers. You do this from the Navigation Pane on the Sales and Relationship Manager role center.

After you set up your two basic sales cycles, define the stages that sales people will go through to convert opportunities to actual sales. These stages will differ from sales cycle to sales cycle. For example, a sales cycle for existing customers doesn't need to include initial contact or qualification stages, or a company presentation, because you already have a relationship.

If you remember the Sales Pipeline chart (also called a funnel) on the Sales and Relationship Manager role center above, sales cycle stages drive parts of that chart. Optionally, on the Sales Cycle Stages page, you can specify whether moving opportunity through sales cycle requires a quote, or if the sales person can skip some of the sales stages. You can also define due dates, using a date formula, to set a date by which a sales cycle stage should be completed. For more information, see this help topic.

From opportunity to sales

After you define sales cycles and stages, your company can approach opportunity management with more structure and control.

You can create opportunities from multiple places in Financials:

• The ribbon on the Sales and Relationship Manager role center
• Contact cards 
• The Interaction Log Entries page. This is available only if you track email correspondence between your sales people and customers (read more about this in my previous blog - Stay in the know - see latest email interactions with Customers). 

I recommend that you use a contact card or the Interaction log. This gives Financials more context, so you'll have to fill in fewer fields. You'll only need to describe what the opportunity is about, and when you expect to close it (convert it to a sale).

The top part of the Opportunity card contains general information about the opportunity, such as a description, contact information, and the sales cycles it will go through. The lower part tracks the stages. 

The first step in running an opportunity through your sales cycle is to activate it. This separates active opportunities from those that are being drafted, and adds your opportunity to the sales pipeline. Note that when you leave the Create opportunity dialog, Financials will ask whether you want to activate the opportunity.

After you activate an opportunity, you'll move it through your sales cycle stages by updating it. During different stages of sales cycles, Financials will ask you for things like estimated sales, chances of success, and whether to move the opportunity to the next stage or the previous. According to how the Sales Manager has set it up, Financials will let you skip the stages that you are allowed to, or stop you in the sales cycle until you do something that's required, such as assigning a sales quote to the opportunity. The Sales pipeline chart that displays on the Sales and Relationship Manager role center will reflect updates to opportunities.

Closing an opportunity means you've either won or lost the sale. You can close an opportunity during, or at the end of the sales cycle. Financials will ask you for win or loss information, including the reasons for the outcome. 

For each sales person, the Sales and Relationship Manager role center offers the number of opportunities that are not started, in progress, and won or lost.

Keeping the above in mind and seeing how the pieces of opportunity management work together in the Sales and Relationship Manger role center to help you structure and control your sales process, who wouldn't change the role (center)?

P.S. All above information is also available in phone and tablet apps for Financials.