Salesforce Opportunity Management

Nikita R.

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

Updated: Jul 8th, 2024

“Streamline the way you manage Opportunities by understanding all that Salesforce has to offer!“

Since Salesforce Opportunity Management is a big part of Sales Cloud, we are going to discuss how this CRM giant’s tools can support sales teams with common selling tasks, like tracking deals.

So, join us in the article below to get Salesforce advice on how to take your sales pipeline to the next level for more business growth with just a few opportunity management changes.

We know you want to close those deals faster than the competition. Let’s dive in and learn about Salesforce and Opportunities.

What Are Opportunities in Salesforce?

Salesforce opportunities are options that teams identify as great potential for sales transactions or deals. Tracking a Salesforce opportunity plays a big part in a typical sales process. The purpose of this activity is to manage revenue-generating operations at every stage to close a deal, such as:

• Tracking Opportunities in Salesforce
• Predicting Business Revenue
• Manage Sales Pipelines

Let’s take a look at two robust features that Salesforce provides for opportunity management.

Supporting Sales Stages

Salesforce gives us stages that can be customized to meet the sales process of a business. This feature ensures that all teams are following the same sales steps and tasks. Additionally, the opportunity can be identified quickly, so managers can find out which part of the process they are residing in. Managers can then plan and implement ways to accelerate the closing of deals.

Supporting the Sales Teams

Sales representatives can use Salesforce’s visual guides. They teach users how to move an opportunity from one stage to the next in a sales process. This is a useful feature if you have new employees on your team as it can help streamline your onboarding process.

How to Create an Opportunity in Salesforce?

This is a popular question amongst our readers when it comes to Salesforce Opportunity management. We can share the steps below to help you create Salesforce opportunities. It’s quite a straight-forward process.

1. Go to your Opportunities tab in Salesforce. You can find the Opportunity tab in Salesforce either through the navigation bar or the App Launcher.
2. Now, click the New button and fill in the details required by your Salesforce integration to add an opportunity to the platform.
3. Some of the details you need to provide include a name for the opportunity, an account name, a close date, and more.
4. If your business has configured custom Salesforce opportunity fields when creating opportunities in Salesforce, you will need to fill these out.
5. The last step is to save your opportunity in Salesforce.

Opportunity Stages in Salesforce

When you use the Salesforce CRM platform, you can visually represent and track the different stages in your opportunity management process. These stages should include all the phases that Salesforce opportunities travel through in a sales pipeline, such as initial contact with a lead to sealing a deal and gaining a customer.

The benefit of choosing Salesforce for managing opportunities is that you can customize your stages to match the requirements of your unique sales process. Nailing an optimized sales process for opportunity management in Salesforce will give managers greater visibility as to what is going on with an opportunity, but it can also help you predict future revenues.

Here a few common Salesforce opportunity stages that you might want to add to your sales process.

1. Prospecting

This is usually the first stage and is created to add an opportunity in Salesforce. Sales representatives can upload basic information to the opportunity at this stage of the sales process.

At this point, trying to convert an opportunity in Salesforce into a customer is quite low. The probability of conversion sits at 10%. This stage communicates to a business that sales agents are reaching out to clients and are in the process of qualifying their interaction.

2. Qualification

This opportunity stage in Salesforce is active when a sales team evaluates whether the client is worth contacting. To do this, the sales representative will study the prospect’s needs and finances available to make purchases.

At this stage of the sales pipeline, an opportunity has a higher chance of becoming a customer. The statistics sit between 20 and 30%. During this stage, sales representatives are busy with creating needs analysis reports and confirming budgets with clients. Managers can check Salesforce and understand that the sales team is still in the process of making decisions about an opportunity.

3. Value Proposition

This stage represents to the business that the sales representative is working on engaging with the client to show them the value of your products and services. This stage is essential for convincing clients how your business offering might meet their specific needs.

Converting leads to customers at this point could go either way, with the conversion rate sitting at 50%. During this phase, managers can expect sales representatives to be performing product demos and presentations to potential customers.

These are only a few common stages of opportunity management that can be used in Salesforce. Make sure to add more to your Salesforce instance to completely track and manage the sales pipeline, like:

Needs Analysis

Proposal Quoting

Price Quoting

Negotiation

Closed Deal – Won

Closed Deal – Lost

The Benefits of Managing Opportunities in Salesforce

Salesforce for business operations is a game-changer when it comes to sales. One of the benefits for conducting opportunity management in Salesforce is that you get to speed up tasks and processes for sales teams. Since Salesforce has many tools and features to support these types of automation, sales teams can reduce their administrative responsibilities and spend time on more creative operations, like sharing valuable case studies with opportunities.

Another benefit for the business as a whole is that upper management gets to view every stage through which an opportunity in Salesforce travels. This level of visibility gives managers the chance to oversee team performance and pivot strategies for sales pipelines if required. Thanks to the capabilities of managing opportunity data in real-time, managers will also have the most accurate data to gather insights for making decisions.

Salesforce: Lead Vs. Opportunity

Before we wrap up, we wanted to share a popular topic in the sales industry. The terms “lead” and “opportunities” can mean similar things, but it’s important to know that they are different.

So, what’s the difference between a Salesforce Lead and Opportunity? We already explained that Salesforce opportunities are potential deals or sales. They are linked to contacts and accounts with tracking features for all stages of opportunity management in Salesforce.

Now, what is a lead? In lead management theory, a lead is a potential customer who shows interest in your products or services. Usually, this interest is captured in your platform with Salesforce web-to-lead forms.

Nonetheless, leads also need to go through a process to get qualified. The aim of tracking leads in Salesforce is to try convert high quality leads into customers. Read our Salesforce lead management article for more information on this topic.

We hope to see you soon!

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.