Opportunity records are designed for managing your sales pipeline and potential deals. For a manufacturing organization, they might be connected to clients who want to buy your products. For a non-profit organization, they might connect to people who want to donate to your cause.
Opportunities are the central record for these kinds of processes, as we describe in our sales overview.
Opportunities can be automatically created through a standard sales process when converting a qualified lead, or they can be set up manually, with links to their related contacts and organizations. Links are important for indicating who is involved with the opportunity and what their role is.
The opportunity record
Opportunities have a few fields that are unique.
- Current State & Reason - Keep track of an opportunity by setting its current state to Open, Suspended, Abandoned, Lost, or Won. Open and Suspended are considered "open" states, and the others "closed" states, meaning their work is complete. Your administrator can also create State Reasons indicating why the state was changed.
- Value - Because opportunities are tied to deals, they have a numerical currency value. The total value displays at the top of any list of opportunities and can also be included in reports. When you create or edit a record, you can define this potential value either as a fixed bid or lump sum, per hour, per week, or per month.
- Probability of Winning - The likelihood that the deal will be won. You will change this value higher or lower as the negotiations progress.
- Forecast Close Date - An estimated date that you expect the deal will close by.
- Link Email Address - A version of your Insightly mailbox address that will link any saved emails to this opportunity, as well as senders and recipients. This helps you track correspondence to maintain a complete history of the deal.
- Converted from Lead - If the opportunity was created from a lead, we'll display this field and add a hyperlink the original lead record.
- Pipeline - Pipelines can be set up by an administrator to guide your salespeople through an established process. Completed stages are in gray, and current stages are in red.
Closing and converting to a project
Once you've closed a deal, you can create a project right from an opportunity to manage the work you'll do for your new client. When you convert an opportunity to a project:
- A new project will be created.
- The opportunity status will change to Won.
- The opportunity will be conveniently linked to the new project.
- You will have the option to link the opportunity's emails and notes to the project, and copy its files.
- Any links associated with the opportunity will also be linked to the new project.
If you'd like more information on opportunities, learn how to create one or watch our video.