Creating Opportunities

What is an Opportunity?

An opportunity is a potential sale with a specific customer that has shown interest in your product or service. Unlike leads, which are early-stage prospects who have not necessarily shown interest in buying from you or whose potential is not yet verified, opportunities are more advanced. They typically involve detailed discussions, pricing considerations, quotes and negotiations. The terms “deal” and “opportunity” are used interchangeably to describe the same thing in sales.

In TeamGram CRM, opportunities are tracked through different stages of the sales process until they are either won, lost, cancelled, or abandoned. Unless an opportunity is closed (terminated) by moving it onto one of these states, it is considered to be open, meaning the sales team is still actively pursuing to win it.

When to Create an Opportunity

Creating—or opening—an opportunity at the right time helps ensure that your sales pipeline stays organized and that deals are properly tracked. You must create an opportunity when a qualified lead or an existing customer shows interest in making a new purchase.

Don’t wait until the customer requests a quote to create an opportunity. If a potential sale has been identified and the customer is open to discussing it, an opportunity should be created in your CRM to track progress and manage interactions effectively.

As a general rule, if there is an ongoing sales conversation, you must have an opportunity in your CRM about it. 

If you have conversations about different deals with the same customer, you must have separate opportunities for each of them in your CRM. However, a single opportunity may include sales discussions about multiple items, as long as they are part of the same deal.

Steps to Create an Opportunity in TeamGram CRM

To create an opportunity, follow these steps:

1. Click Opportunities at the top menu bar.
2. Click the sales pipeline tab.
3. Using the pipeline selector near the top left corner, select the sales pipeline where the opportunity will be tracked (if you are using multiple pipelines)
4. Click the New Opportunity button to call up the new opportunity form.
5. Access rights: The blue symbol near the top right corner of the opportunity form allows you to set who can access this opportunity. Click it to show the sharing settings for it. The default access rights are set by your system administrator. Make any necessary changes to grant or revoke rights. The changes you make will only apply to this specific opportunity.
6. Customer name: Type in the first few letters of the customer’s name and select it from the drop down list if you have already entered a customer with that name before. If you can’t find the customer in the drop down list, select new company (or new contact, if your customer is a person) and fill in the fields in the popup box before continuing.
7. Opportunity name: Describe this opportunity in a few words. You can enter a project name, or describe what the customer intends to buy.
8. Primary contact person: Enter the name of the person to contact at this customer. To do this, start typing the person’s name and see if you can find it in the dropdown box. If you can’t find the contact, click the new contact option and fill in the new contact pop-up before continuing. Alternatively, you can click the + sign to the right of this field and select your contact there, if it is already in TeamGram CRM.
9. Amount and Probability: You can enter an estimated value for this sale, and a probability of winning it. However, it can be difficult to determine these when the opportunity is new, so you can leave these blank.
10. Start date: Start date is the date you start including this opportunity in your pipeline. Ideally, this would be the day you create the opportunity, but in some cases you may want to enter an opportunity to start in the future, or in the past (if you have already been working on it but were late in entering it into TeamGram CRM).
11. Expected closing date: This is the date you expect to close the sale.
12. Status: Leave it as Open-Active. Open-On hold is a status sometimes used for opportunities stalled by the customer for extended periods.
13. Stage: Typically a new opportunity enters the pipeline from the first stage. In some cases where you have already been working on the opportunity but enter it into TeamGram CRM after it has advanced to other stages, you may need to specify another stage.
14. Pricing Table: Use this table to enter individual items you are planning to sell, their unit prices, applicable discounts and taxes. This is rarely done when the opportunity is brand new. You can leave it blank if you don’t know which items to include yet.
15. Click Save. This will create a new opportunity, represented as a separate box in the column corresponding to the stage you specified.

You are now ready to start managing this opportunity in your pipeline.