Anytine you change a sales opportunity status to Closed, postponed, you will be prompted for the closing date and status, and an entry is automatically logged to the Journal.
All things must come to an end, and this is certainly true with sales opportunities. What do you do with a sales opportunity that are no longer actively pursuing? You have a several options, so please consider all of them before deciding on the strategy that best fits your needs.
Just Say Bye-Bye and Delete It
Some old school sales managers were often heard saying "I ain't no history teacher! What have you done for me today?". Sometimes the simplest option is to delete the sales opportunity from your pipeline. Once deleted, there is no backup or restoring deleted opportunities. It is gone forever, and you go on about your business.
Changing the Status
It is important to learn lessons from our experiences - both good and bad. By keeping sales opportunities on-line after they have closed, we can analyze what went wrong, what went right, and report progress - month-to-date sales, etc.
If you choose this strategy, we recommend that the first step in closing a sales opportunity is to change the status: Won, Lost, or Postponed. In doing so, you will also set the closing date.
Where Do You Keep Closed Sales Opportunities?
Once you have closed a sales opportunity you should have a strategy regarding where to keep you sales opportunities. You may elect to keep them in your current pipeline until end-of-month, end-of-quarter, etc. Or you may use the Archive pipeline to hold closed deals.
Archive
You may also choose to use an archive sales pipeline for completed sales opportunities. In this strategy, after changing the status of a sales opportunity to Won/Lost/Postponed you then Archive the completed sales opportunities. They are removed from your current pipeline, but are saved into the archive pipeline. This allows the option for both cut-and-paste restoration of a sales opportunity and also for analysis of your completed opportunities in the archive pipeline. How many did we win? How many did we lose? Some of the reports can be very helpful in this post-game analysis.
The Road Goes On Forever And the Party Never Ends
Another end-of-the-deal option is to leave the sales opportunity in your pipeline for a period of time after the deal has closed. This actually makes a lot of sense in a lot of cases. By changing the status of the sales opportunity (Won, Lost, Postponed) you can then see month-to-date sales, previous month sales, etc. through some reports (as pictured above). Also, by making "Status" on of your Category buttons you can also see your win/loss/in-play information on-screen.
