The sales opportunities module allows you to create a sales opportunity in the application immediately after it has been identified. For example, a prospect inquires about certain products your company is selling. You can respond immediately by creating a sales opportunity, allowing you to track this prospect and inform others about the status of this lead.
Entering a Sales Opportunity
To enter and track sales opportunities, go to the SAP Business One main menu and choose Sales Opportunities → Sales Opportunity to display the Sales Opportunity window (see below). In this section, we go into more detail about this window and the most relevant tabs.
Who Is Your Prospect?
The first step in entering a sales opportunity is identifying your prospect. Click on the button to the right of the Business Partner Code field to display the List of Business Partners window. If your prospect has already been entered as a customer or as a lead, then the prospect will be listed here. If not, click on the New button to display the Business Partner Master Data window.
If you are selling to an existing customer, the Sales Opportunity header includes details such as the total of all invoices the customer currently owes, taking into account any credit memos they might have. Such information doesn't apply, of course, to new leads.
Business Partner Territory and Sales Employee default from the business partner master data record; you can change them. Owner indicates who is leading the effort on this sales opportunity (and who should receive any commissions it generates).
You can give a name to your opportunity in the Opportunity Name field; SAP Business One assigns a number automatically. The Status field defaults to Open; the sales opportunity remains open until you close it on the Summary tab, providing flexibility for you to continue to track the opportunity, if desired, even after the sale is closed and the delivery has been made, to ensure customer satisfaction.
Closing % is associated with the stage of the sales opportunity, as discussed previously.
Note that only the Potential tab has required fields, but each tab holds a particular type of information that helps you track not only this sale, but all your sales opportunities as a whole.
The Bottom Line: What's the Potential for This Sales Opportunity?
Sales managers are especially interested in the Potential tab, and so are you if you receive a commission on your sales.
On this tab you enter information about when this sale might close. Enter either a Predicted Closing Date or a number of days or weeks or years in which you expect this sale to close in the Predicted Closing In field (and the drop-down list allows you to specify days, weeks, or months). You fill in one field and SAP Business One calculates the other one, so if you fill in a date, the number is filled in for you (the reverse is also true).
You must fill in a Potential Amount for your sale. The Weighted Amount is calculated by SAP Business One based on the likelihood that this sale will close. In this example 6% of leads turn into sales. Therefore the Weighted Amount is calculated to be £21,002.82, which is 6% (Closing %) of £350,047 (Potential Amount). On the Stages tab, as we will see, each sales stage is associated with a percentage that is used to estimate how likely it is that a given sale will close (the Closing % field in the header shows the percentage for the current stage of the sale). This methodology produces more realistic forecasting.
Another factor that is important for forecasting is the Level of Interest. Is this a hot lead or just lukewarm? This drop-down field contains entries defined by your company.
Interest Range helps you keep track of the kinds of things this client is interested in; making notes here may help you in the future to make additional sales to this prospect. You can indicate the prospect's primary interest using a checkbox.
Rounding Out the Sales Opportunity
The remaining tabs on the Sales Opportunity window help you track a variety of important information.
On the Stages tab, you track the sales opportunity through the stages, moving it from one stage to another as the deal progresses. The Potential Amount may not change from stage to stage (though it can), but the Weighted Amount changes because later stages typically have a higher likelihood of closing than earlier stages. As mentioned in the previous section, stages are defined by your company.
The General tab allows you to manage sales opportunities in which a third party, such as a reseller, is handling the sale on your behalf. The Partners tab, on the other hand, is available for defining relationships of any type. If you are a general contractor, for example, you could include subcontractors on the Partners tab. Using these two tabs, you can manage complex sales opportunities that involve a number of parties.
On the Competitors tab you specify who else is competing for this sale and the threat level of that competitor. The intensity of the competition is gauged in the Threat Level field; you can either select the default for this competitor or choose a different threat level for this particular opportunity.
If the sale is ultimately won by a competitor, click the Won checkbox. By tracking such information, you can later perform competitive analyses about which sales are being lost and won, who is winning business from you, and why, if you know the reason.
The Summary tab is important for indicating the status of this opportunity: whether it is open, won, or lost.
On the Attachments tab you find related documents such as sales orders or sales quotations as well as e-mail messages, Microsoft Word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations – any type of document. By keeping all this information together, you can create a coherent view of this particular sales opportunity.