You need to track what is most important to your company's bottom line: the deals in the making that will become your revenue stream. You create a sales opportunity record for each sales opportunity and, since you may well be working on more than one deal per customer, SAP Business One enables you to track by opportunity, not just by customer and lead.
Sales Opportunities Process Overview
The basic process for managing sales opportunities in SAP Business One is shown below:
Step 1: Setting up sales-related information
Sales managers set up important information such as the stages that a sale passes through and the likelihood (by percentage) that a sale in a given stage will close. This information helps with sales forecasting. Reports are key to the sales process, and the setup for the sales opportunities module in SAP Business One relates almost entirely to reporting. What do you want to monitor? What do you want to know? Do you want reports on who your competitors are? This information must be entered so that reports can be generated that help you monitor the all-important sales process.
Step 2: Managing sales opportunities
Salespeople enter sales opportunities and manage them throughout the sales process. One simple screen in SAP Business One provides salespeople with comprehensive information about a particular sales opportunity. Again, the more details you enter for sales opportunities, the more visibility you have when you report on your leads, whether your own or those of your team.
Ongoing appointments, phone calls, tasks, and contact management can be done through SAP Business One or using Microsoft Outlook, as described later in this chapter.
Step 3: Reporting
Sales opportunities reports give you visibility into the sales pipeline, won and lost opportunities, sales forecasting, and more.
Setting Up Sales-Related Information
You set up information that you want to track for sales opportunities by going to Administration → Setup → Sales Opportunities. Here you can set up sales stages, competitors, partners, and relationships. You may want to set up all of these parameters, but most critical for sales forecasting are the sales stages.
Some sales cycles are long and some are short. Some have ten stages and some have two. Setting up sales stages, and the associated likelihood of closing based on those stages, is very important for accurate sales forecasting. For example, if a deal has a potential amount of £100,000 but is at a stage where it has a 20% chance of closing, its weighted amount is £20,000.
In the Sales Stages - Setup window, you enter a name for each stage, a stage number, and a closing percentage. For example, let's say there are six sales stages, from Lead, which has a closing percentage of 6%, to Order, which has a closing percentage of 95%. How do you determine the closing percentage? Think of it this way. If you have 100 leads, how many turn into sales? That is the closing percentage for that sales stage. If the answer is 20 out of 100, you have a closing percentage of 20%.
What if you later discover that more realistic percentages are higher or lower than indicated here? That's no problem. Just go back into setup and change them; all your sales forecasting will be adjusted automatically. In fact, the Stage Analysis report, created by choosing Sales Opportunity → Sales Opportunities Reports → Stage Analysis and shown below, is designed to help you fine-tune your closing percentages based on actual history.
