Portal Opportunity Management

What are the 6 most important factors to ensure Sales Manager maps correctly to your own business processes for Opportunity Management?

With all of the sophistication and customisation available in the Claromentis Sales Manager Application, it is possible to get confused about what really matters in a successful opportunity management system.

The good news is that really we only need to worry about 6 important features when mapping Sales Manager to an existing business process for opportunity management – the rest are visual enhancements or relatively minor features that we can worry about at a later date.


• Stage Definition
• Transitions between stages
• Opportunity metadata workflows
• When to leverage document resources
• Strong Stages
• Embedding eForms


Let’s discuss each of these in turn:

1. Stages

Clarity about the number of meaningful stages, their names and associated risked revenue factors for forecasting roll up is very important. A mature existing sales process can give you the significant stages and names, often the only way to get to correct risk factors is to enter sensible estimates and then compare forecasts with actual revenues realised over time. In this way the relevant factors can be adjusted until the forecast converges onto reality.

If your task is to actually design a sales process for an organisation that has relied to date on ad hoc approaches and the skills of certain individuals, then you should talk to the high achievers, pool their feedback, and try to simplify as much as possible. There is nothing successful sales people hate more than needless administration – so if you can get the process down to 6 stages from lead to sale you are probably about right.

2. Transitions between stages

It is extremely important that you map possible transitions correctly. Can sales people move an opportunity from lead to sale without even having a meeting? Can an opportunity go backwards before progressing again? Can it be lost from anywhere?

This is also where the great sales stages system you just got everyone’s agreement on can become complex – it maybe that the same stage needs different metadata and collateral depending on the product or service being sold. There is no problem with this in Sales Manager – you will end up with a complex matrix of ‘stagex producty’ stages in sales manager administration, but the simplicity is still expressed through the valid transitions – the complexity is effectively removed from the end user.

You will need an initial stage that is the same for all products though, or separate projects for each product family – the choice is yours but where possible keep the number of separate projects as low as possible, as come users will need permission across multiple projects and territories, which can therefore allow them to enter the opportunity in an incorrect project.


3. Opportunity metadata workflows

The balance of enough information, but not too much administration, is well handled by the workflows in the opportunity metadata form. You will need to find out some essential basics:

• What information is needed at each stage?
• What earlier information is now no longer needed as the business process continues?

You can then set up the tabs, and for which stages they are shown, in the project administration. This is very powerful, take time to talk to several account managers and support staff to establish the best visibility of important data across multiple stages.

4. When to leverage document resources

There are certain stages where information in the form of documents need to be pulled from the version controlled document store, and created in the opportunity. Obvious ones relate to presentation collateral at early stages, and relevant product information. Contracts and SLAs can also be pulled in during the relevant negotiation stages closer to the sale.

Automating this in the Sales Manager Administration panel really creates productivity gains for the user, and makes sure that the latest versions of important presentations and legal documents will be used.


5. Strong Stages

Some mature business processes, and those involving large tenders and resources to compete, often have explicit strong stages that can be replicated exactly be Sales Manager. Simply define which changes are strong, and who has permission to approve requests to transition an opportunity to a strong stage.

If you are designing a new process, keep strong stages to a minimum – if you in fact need any at all. The staff to approve decisions will be notified automatically, and this can cause irritation if there are too many of them.


6. Embedding eForms

The final aspect we need to consider is that of embedding any form based workflow into the Opportunity Directly. This is a powerful and simple technique, often used for example to request resources or a complex demonstration from presales – who can then see everything they need in the opportunity and documentation.

When planning e-Form integration it pays to think outside the immediate sales process – think about processes relating to credit checking and other matters. It could be that early access by certain users to key information can make a big difference to the opportunity at later stages.

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