Opportunity Tracking and Pipeline Management
Opportunity tracking and pipeline management are critical processes that your marketing and sales staff use to monitor and assess their efforts as they pursue new business for your firm.
Pipeline Management
Your sales and marketing pipeline includes all the people and activities involved in generating new business. The pipeline begins with the identification of new leads and continues as you target those leads through marketing campaigns. Because you maintain all lead and marketing campaign data in the Info Centers, and because you can link and track leads and campaigns, Vision makes it easy for your sales and marketing staff to manage new business in the pipeline.
After leads are in the pipeline, they can be qualified or disqualified, depending on their level of interest in doing business with your firm. If a qualified lead has an upcoming project for which they are accepting bids, you can convert that lead to an opportunity and begin tracking opportunity activities and status.
Finally, if your opportunity results in an awarded project, you can create a new project record from the opportunity record, ensuring continuity of data from the project's prospect stage forward.
Opportunity Tracking
When you have identified an opportunity for potential future business, whether from a lead or from elsewhere, you can enter the opportunity data in the Opportunity Info Center.
Use the Opportunity Info Center to:
- Enter opportunity name, address, and phone information.
- Retrieve estimated and weighted revenues.
- Review opportunity open and close dates, total days open, and current status.
- Schedule and manage opportunity activities — including marketing campaign activities.
- Identify the team members assigned to each opportunity and specify team roles.
- Link clients and contacts with opportunities and specify roles.
- Access files related to your opportunities.
- Export data to Microsoft® Excel®
After you enter opportunity data in the Opportunity Info Center, this data is available to all personnel at your firm who have security access to the Info Center. This data can be used to generate reports, schedule activities, and monitor opportunity status.
In addition to the tracking features available in the Opportunity Info Center, you can use the Opportunity Stage Change Alert feature to notify team members when the status of an opportunity changes. This makes it possible for you to keep staff members apprised of the current status of your opportunities and to trigger appropriate team responses as an opportunity moves from one stage to another.