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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / When is an opportunity...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

When is an opportunity "won"?

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Posted on by Fluent 60

I am after a bit of advice on how to use the opportunity section correctly.

We sell a repair service to the construction industry and our sales people effectively "win" a construction site.  This win is little more than an agreement of rates and a handshake that when they need a repair they will call us rather than a competitor. We then use CRM to keep in touch with the site through mailings and phone calls for the duration of the build.

Most of the work we do is very small (2 hours at a time) but we often will complete 100 jobs on a given building site over its lifetime (2-3 years)

Our sales people currently get credit for any sale after they have agreed rates.  I am having a little bit of difficulty in translating this into Dynamics Crm.

A "win" seems to be very final and aimed at a specific sales (e.g. 100 widgets to be delivered on 1st April).  I don't really want to leave an opportunity open for 3 years as it makes the estimated revenue very difficult to work with.

Does anyone have any experience of working in a similar scenario?  When would you classify this opportunity as won?  Closing an opportunity asks for an "Actual Revenue" and in our current format we would be years away from being able to finalise that value.

Any input appreciated.

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  • GL-23071537-0 Profile Picture
    GL-23071537-0 on at

    Hi Fluent,

    Are you wanting to track in CRM the credit that sales people get for each of those small jobs?  Or is that kept/calculated elsewhere.  As a business analyst, I would need to know what you are hoping to get out of CRM in order to comment on the design, but in my experience it is totally fine to close an opportunity with no revenue if your opportunity does not represent actual revenue--only an agreement.  

    I have also seen construction/repair create a more lengthy forecast on the opportunity such as revenue per month or quarter so that they can report each month on the expected revenue from certain jobs.  However, I'm not sure if you know this information in your line of business.

  • Fluent Profile Picture
    Fluent 60 on at

    Hi Gretchen,  

    Thanks for the quick reply. I was really hoping to be able to make use of the sales pipeline so that we can better estimate the volume of work we may receive from a construction site.

    In its current format we really have very little visibility of what the sales person believes each site is worth. Looking in from the outside I have no idea if a site is likely to use us 100 or 1000 times.

    The nature of our business does mean that it is difficult to estimate accurately but I was playing with the idea of asking the sales team to estimate per quarter.  My concern with this method is that if an opportunity is left open for 3 months then the sales pipeline may get a bit misleading as sales received would also be showing in the sales pipeline.

    Therefore would it be better to get the sales person to close the opportunity as won on receipt of the first order?

  • GL-23071537-0 Profile Picture
    GL-23071537-0 on at

    Hi Fluent,

    There are a number of ways you could architect the system to report on revenue that is distributed over a period of time.  For example, you could have a parent entitity to the opportunity that is the contract...and given the contract range and revenue, you could created child opportunities for each period (using workflow).  The benefit of that is that you could update the forecast for each contract on a monthly/quarterly basis...but this could also get laborious.

    Another way would be to have the contract be a single Opportunity, but indicated how many months or quarters the revenue should be distributed.  In that case, you could not use oob dashboards to report the pipeline--you could only use a custom report that would divide up the total revenue over the date range.

    I'm sure there are many other options to consider, but these things involve more of a dynamics discussion with all the requirements and objectives on the table.

    Hope this helps!

  • GL-23071537-0 Profile Picture
    GL-23071537-0 on at

    Forgot to mention your question about closing the opportunity as won on receipt of the first order.  Seems to me like it would still be okay to close the opportunity at the receipt of the contract or agreement that they will use your services.  But if your organization views the first order as more of a solid sign that there is an agreement, then that would be a better choice in terms of creating an accurate forecast.

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