Deleting An Opportunity

***** Software On Sailboats Desktop Sales Manager v6
***** Contact management software, sales automation software, CRM software

The following example assumes you are a sales executive for Rhythm and Blues Services - a mythical professional services company that provides equipment and services to the professional touring musician. The example pipeline is based upon the Standard template, and uses either the Eastern Area or Western Area example pipelines that were installed with this program.

Congratulations or condolences! Win, lose or draw - like death and taxes, it is inevitably true that a sales opportunity eventually comes to an end. In the best of cases the sales opportunity turns into an order. In other cases it doesn't - the customer chooses another solution, or makes no decision at all.

You have several ways of managing completed sales opportunities so that you can focus more clearly on the business remaining in front of you. You may wish to review these options in the section Closing A Sales Opportunity, located in the Concepts area of the Getting Started chapter.

Deleting A Sales Opportunity The Easy Way

Deleting is certainly the easiest option. If you have no desire to keep record of won/lost opportunities, then this is the choice for you. Select the sales opportunity and press the Delete button in the Opportunities tab.

Managing Completed Sales Opportunities Through Status and Archive

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
George Santayana

A more powerful way of removing a completed sales opportunity from your sales pipeline is to Archive it. The Archive button is also located on the Opportunities tab.

Archive removes the sales opportunity from your pipeline and stores it in another sales pipeline that is used as a "collection pipeline" for all your past victories and losses. The advantage to you is that you can periodically review and analyze your wins and losses by opening the Archive pipeline. The Archive pipeline is an especially powerful pipeline for reporting.

Hint: One of the fields in the Standard template is the "Conclusion" field. This field can be used to record the reason that a sales opportunity was won or lost. Too expensive? Great relationship? Liked the features? Hated the features? Put it in this field before you Archive the opportunity. When you go back into your Archive pipeline, this information will be of great help in understanding your sales performance. How much business did we lose because the price was too high?

Set The Status

You will also want to strongly consider changing the Status of your sales opportunity to Won, Lost, or Postponed prior to archive. The closing date is critical to sales cycle calculations and Month-To-Date and Quarter-To-Date reporting. Changing Status to Won, Lost, or Postponed will automatically ask for a closing date.

If you wish to change the closing date after it has been set, you may do so using the Opportunity Edit form's Analysis tab.

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