Moving from Leads to Opportunities

Leads represent potential customers and sales at the beginning of the sales funnel. Because not every lead will turn into a sale, keeping those prospects as Leads helps separate them from more developed Opportunities and keeps your CRM data organized. Once you've adequately nurtured a Lead, gathered the necessary information, and determined that the prospect is ready to move forward, you can qualify it. A qualified Lead becomes an Opportunity, representing a more likely sale from either a new or existing customer. If a Lead isn't going to progress, you can instead disqualify or close it.

Benefits of Qualifying a Lead

One benefit of creating an Opportunity by qualifying a Lead is that Dynamics 365 can carry information forward instead of requiring you to manually duplicate it. Information that can carry into the next stage includes:

• Data from the Lead record
• Account information
• Contact information
• Business Process Flow information
• Timeline entries

The original Lead is still available after qualification. It's closed with a status of qualified, allowing you to retain it for historical and reporting purposes.

Creating Opportunities from Scratch

Not every Opportunity needs to begin as a Lead. For example, an existing customer may express interest in purchasing another product or service. In that situation, you may already have enough information about the customer and the potential sale to create an Opportunity directly. This gives your sales team flexibility to use the process that makes the most sense for each type of potential sale.

Assigning Opportunities

Opportunities can be assigned to users or teams. Sales teams may be structured around factors such as:

• Geographic regions
• Products or services
• Types of Opportunities

Assigning Opportunities appropriately can help ensure that the right salesperson or team is responsible for continuing the sales process.

Understanding the Opportunity Record

The Opportunity record provides a central place to manage information about a potential sale as it progresses through the sales process. Important elements can include:

• Business Process Flow stage
• Timeline activities
• Estimated revenue
• Estimated closing date
• Opportunity rating, such as Hot, Warm, or Cold
• Competitors
• Stakeholders
• Sales team members

The Opportunity form is highly customizable, so organizations can adapt these fields and components around their own sales process.

Using the Business Process Flow

The Business Process Flow continues from the Lead into the Opportunity, providing salespeople with guidance as the potential sale progresses. Different stages can contain different steps for users to complete. This can help create a more consistent sales process and make it easier to understand where each Opportunity currently sits in the pipeline. Because the Business Process Flow is customizable, organizations can adapt its stages and requirements to reflect the way their sales teams actually work.

Tracking Estimated Revenue and Closing Dates

Estimated Revenue helps you record the expected value of an Opportunity. Depending on your Dynamics 365 configuration, Estimated Revenue can be entered manually or calculated using the products associated with the Opportunity. The Estimated Closing Date records when you expect the potential sale to close. Together with other Opportunity information, these fields provide useful information for forecasting and understanding the overall sales pipeline.

Adding Products to an Opportunity

Products can be added to an Opportunity from the product catalog. You can also add write-in products when appropriate. Products appear in different contexts as a prospect progresses from Lead to Opportunity to Quote, but the associated product information can continue through the sales process. This is particularly important for pricing. Rather than simply pulling new information from the product catalog at each stage, Dynamics 365 can preserve information associated with the sale so that pricing changes made during the process aren't unintentionally lost. Organizations can configure how this information flows into Opportunity or Quote lines based on their sales and fulfillment processes.

Customize Opportunities Around Your Sales Process

Opportunity forms can be customized to capture information that's particularly important to your organization. Common customizations can include items such as:

• Probability
• Confidence
• Business Process Flow stages and steps
• Other fields specific to your sales process

This flexibility allows the Opportunity to become more than a standard CRM record. It can reflect the information your salespeople actually need to gather and maintain as they work toward a sale.

Visualizing the Sales Pipeline

Dynamics 365 can use Opportunity information to create a Sales Pipeline chart. The chart provides a visual representation of estimated revenue across different stages of the sales process. Like other Dynamics 365 charts, the information displayed depends on the currently selected view. This makes views an important part of analyzing your pipeline. For example, you could create a custom view for a regional sales team and then use that view with the Sales Pipeline chart. This lets the team focus on Opportunities relevant to its region rather than the entire organization's pipeline. Custom views and charts can help sales teams:

• Monitor Opportunities consistently
• Compare groups of Opportunities
• Understand potential revenue
• Analyze movement between sales stages
• Identify trends in the pipeline

Nurturing an Opportunity

Creating an Opportunity doesn't mean the sale is complete. The Opportunity still needs to be nurtured as the customer moves through the decision-making process. Salespeople can use the Opportunity record, timeline, activities, Business Process Flow, products, and other CRM tools to document that work and keep important sales information together. Eventually, the Opportunity will move toward one of two outcomes: won or lost.

Closing an Opportunity as Lost

If the customer is no longer interested or the potential sale is no longer a good fit, the Opportunity can be closed as lost. Recording lost Opportunities is still valuable. It maintains the history of the potential sale and gives your organization data that can be used for future reporting and analysis.

Closing an Opportunity as Won

If the sales process progresses successfully, you may reach the stage where you create a sales Quote for the customer. The customer can accept or reject that Quote. If the Quote is accepted and the sale moves forward, the Opportunity can ultimately be closed as won. If the customer rejects the Quote, it may be possible to revise and renegotiate it, or the sale may ultimately be marked as lost.

Continuing the Dynamics 365 Sales Process

Opportunities provide the structure for managing potential sales that have progressed beyond the early Lead stage. They bring together customer information, activities, products, estimated revenue, closing dates, sales stages, and other details your team needs to nurture a potential sale. By combining customizable Opportunity records with Business Process Flows, views, and pipeline visualizations, Dynamics 365 Sales can help your team track potential revenue and consistently move sales toward a final outcome. The next stage of the sales process goes deeper into Quotes, including how they connect to Opportunities and help move a successful sale toward an Order.