Opportunities Single Dialog Workspace

Use this workspace to enter information about sales opportunities.

A sales opportunity is a potential sale to a customer or a prospective customer with whom you are in contact.

An opportunity can represent a specific sales case or a potential account size—for example, if you expect that signing a given customer will generate a certain revenue over a certain period.

For each opportunity, enter information about the starting date of the sales activity and the expected closing date of the sale. Also enter the expected value of the opportunity and a probability percentage that represents the estimated chance of closing the sale successfully. Based on these figures, Maconomy calculates a weighted value for the opportunity. As a result, entering opportunities provides you with a tool for calculating estimated pipeline sizes and for running reports that show success rates and estimated sales within a given period.

You can also enter information about the events that occur in connection with sales activities. For instance, you might want to track each contact that you make with the prospective customer so that you accumulate historical information about their requests and inquiries. Or you might want to enter information about the internal activities that occur in connection with the sales opportunity.

You manage historical information about the sales process through the event flow functionality. Each time that you create an opportunity, Maconomy automatically creates an event flow in the Event Flows workspace. Use the event functionality to enter historical information about the opportunity. The opportunity's current event flow status is displayed in the Phase field, allowing you to see the progress of the opportunity.

You can assign each opportunity to a given job in the Job Cost module, so that employees can enter and track the time that they spend working on the opportunity. Use the fields in the Job Cost island in the Opportunities tab of this workspace to enter a job, activity, and task for each event in the opportunity's event flow. This enables you to automatically transfer time spent on the opportunity to employee time sheets.

You must assign each opportunity to a contact company that you create in the Contact Companies workspace. You can assign opportunities to existing customers or prospective customers.

When you finally settle an opportunity, you close it. Depending on the outcome of the opportunity, use the Close as Won or Close as Lost action. When you use one of those actions:

• The Status field indicates the outcome that you selected.
• The probability percentage is set to 100 (for a win) or 0 (for a loss).
• The event flow that you assigned to the opportunity is closed. You can no longer change the information for the opportunity. However, you can use the Reopen action to reopen the opportunity, which sets its status field to Open.