How to Create an Opportunity in Salesforce

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Nov 3rd, 2023

Salesforce has many standard objects on its customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help with any business process. As these standard objects are pre-configured, they help your business save time when configuring tasks and processes related to business operations and automation. Accounts, contacts, leads, cases, and opportunities are all common examples of standard objects in Salesforce.

Join us below as we explore the popular Salesforce opportunities and how to create one in your favorite CRM platform to speed up and optimize your sales processes.

What is an opportunity in Salesforce?

It’s a standard object provided by Salesforce that businesses can use to represent their potential deals with a customer on their CRM platform. Opportunities are an essential part of Salesforce as businesses track and manage processes in a sales pipeline.

Some of the information that you can record in Opportunities for potential sales can include the following:

Details of a sale.

The stage of the sale in the sales pipeline.

The likelihood of finalizing a deal.

Potential revenues resulting from a sale.

Explore an Opportunity in Salesforce

Sales teams often use opportunities to perform everyday tasks that include:

Tracking sales on the go.

Forecasting sales.

Prioritizing tasks inside the sales pipeline.

Collaborating with colleagues to support marketing initiatives and customer support strategies.

Generating reports and dashboards to visualize and analyze sales performances.

As we can see, opportunities are super helpful standard objects. Let’s break them down and see what they can include to assist your employees in sales teams:

They are often given a unique name that will describe the sales opportunity in Salesforce.

The Opportunity object will list the account, which can be a customer or company.

A close date for the deal is also added to the Opportunity.

Opportunities also hold stages for the sales process to track the deal at all times. Prospecting, Qualification, Proposal, Quote, Negotiation, and Closed-Won are all examples of stages that could exist in an Opportunity.

The estimated revenue to gain from the deal can also be added to the Opportunity.

Opportunities can also display a percentage to indicate the probability of closing a deal.

The person responsible for managing or creating the Opportunity, such as a sales representative.

Contact roles are also useful information to add to an Opportunity, as these are the employees who engage or are involved with the deal.

You will be happy to know that Salesforce also gives us many tools and features to help manage these Opportunities throughout the sales process.

Salesforce Opportunity Object

So, let’s dive into creating an opportunity in Salesforce. This process has several steps but gets the job done so that you can track potential sales and revenues in Salesforce.

Before we begin to create an opportunity, remember to set up your permissions that will allow you to create and edit opportunities in Salesforce.

Alright, let’s get started!

1. Log into Salesforce with your username and password.

2. Find the App Launcher on your Salesforce homepage and search for Opportunities.

3. On the Opportunities tab, click on the New button to open the new opportunity creation form.

4. Fill out the Salesforce opportunity creation form with your Opportunity Name, Account Name, Close Date, Stage, Type, Lead Source, Amount, Probability, and Description.

5. Add specific products or services if you need them with the Add Product or Add Services buttons.

6. Add your contacts that are related to the opportunity with the Add Contact button if you need to.

7. Click the Save button to create the opportunity in Salesforce.

These are 7 very easy steps to help you create an opportunity in Salesforce. However, keep in mind that you might need additional steps if you have a specific Salesforce edition and customization.

Opportunity Fields in Salesforce

While we are discussing opportunities in Salesforce, we would like to briefly touch on opportunity fields as it is a popular topic.

Salesforce opportunity fields are specific data fields associated with an Opportunity record. They are used to help track potential sales and revenues in your Salesforce system. Organizations tend to store potential sale data in Opportunity fields with Salesforce.

An opportunity’s name, stage, amount, and close date are good examples of data that are stored in Opportunity fields.

We hope to see you soon! 

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