What is an Opportunity?
A Sales Opportunity - sometimes referred to as a ‘Deal’ - is used to track a potential sale from the early stages of initial inquiry all the way through to when your customer signs on to buy your product or service. Having a structured process for your Opportunities helps you win more sales. With the use of Milestones, Capsule lets you forecast your sales and give you valuable insight into your business growth over time.
An Opportunity is linked to a main contact but you can also link additional contacts to it to help keep track of all parties related to the sale. This is helpful if you’re setting up an Opportunity for a company but need to keep track of the specific decision makers that will help win the sale.
On plans with access controls, you can assign Opportunities to specific Teams and use Capsule’s advanced sales reports to better understand how Teams are performing.
How to record products or services on Opportunities
Depending upon the number of different products or services you offer there are some different ways in which you can record which product/service an Opportunity relates to.
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Tags - this is the simplest way to show which product/service an Opportunity relates to. It is the best approach if you have a large number of products/services or if you are regularly adding new products to your range. Using tags on your Opportunities allows you to create filtered lists based on a particular tag which can help with your sales forecasting and reporting. You can read more on adding tags to opportunities here.
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Custom list field - if you offer a small group of products/services that do not change regularly you can create a custom list field for your Opportunities to record a product/service. The custom field will be visible on all opportunities you create. Customers on the Growth, Advanced and Ultimate plans can make this field an important field to remind users to select a product each time they create an Opportunity. Like tags, your custom fields can be reported upon via the Opportunity list view. You can read more on the different types of custom fields and how to set them up here.
How to price Opportunities
You can set up Opportunities with a fixed value for the cost of the product you’re selling. Capsule will then project the income for that sale based on its milestone at the time the Opportunity is expected to close.
If you are offering a product or service with a recurring value over a period of time, you can price Opportunities with payment terms to help you forecast the income for the duration the service is provided. For example; if you add an Opportunity for a 12 month service contract, Capsule will forecast your income for the 12 months after the opportunity has been won.
Opportunity Best Practices
When managing a sales pipeline, it’s good to think about a few key things to help you stay on top of your Opportunities and ensuring that you focus your time and resources on the right thing. Capsule helps you do that but it’s worth having a think about your process before you get started to help you stay even more organized and grow your business.
When you first get started with Capsule, you will inevitably add contacts for the leads that you’re looking to sell to. Before you create an opportunity for a lead, we recommend that you nurture the lead for a little bit. Take some time to contact them by phone or email for example to get an idea of their interest in the products or services that you offer.
Then, only when you think they are “worthy” of an Opportunity, you can create one for them. Working this way ensures that you don’t bury yourself under a mass of Opportunities and their tasks. Instead your pipeline only consists of Opportunities that have at least a small chance of being won which in turn ensures that your conversion rate stays high.
If you find that over time you don’t have enough Opportunities then you can adjust your process and perhaps be more “generous” with who you create an Opportunity for. There’s always a balance but this process is a good starting point.