Sales Opportunity Properties

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

When we decided to produce these products, we wanted to make them as flexible as possible for any business type, and hence the conception of the Template to allow users to design the screen layouts and data formats to exactly suit their professional needs.

Simple concept, yet in its very conception, difficult to reconcile with a value-priced, affordable software product!

While it is relatively simple to design a limitless number of different Templates and hence display an equally limitless number of screen layouts and data contents for sales Opportunities, the problems start when trying to deliver a set of meaningful reports and analyses. Perhaps this is best illustrated by use of an example, so let's take two different businesses, one selling Chemical Products, one selling Consulting Services and look at what typical Opportunity screen layouts might look like:

There are a number of interesting variations in these two Templates/Opportunities which present challenges to any reporting function, notably:

On the Chemical Opportunity, the user needs a Delivery Date, and on the Consulting Opportunity, the same data field holds The Client's Job Title information.

The Chemical Opportunity needs to record Discount, whereas the Consulting Opportunity wants to know the Length of the Engagement

The Consulting Opportunity has a Project Start Date, and the Chemical Opportunity records the date that a Sample was Delivered.

All very different pieces of information, different data formats and yet in the same 'position' on the Opportunity form. We had to come up with a way to present sophisticated and useful reporting on business and sales information, while retaining the flexibility of the Template approach.

Every business works on essentially the same principles:

you sell something to someone, and that something can be goods or services

sometimes you want to give people a discount

deals take time to close and go through a variety of stages

at each stage, the chance of you closing the deal will increase or decrease

you deliver it on or by a particular date

you charge them a price for it

most companies are organized into controllable units which are geographically or logically based

you break down the people to whom you are selling into various categories

While each business works off most or all of these principles, the number of names and titles that are given to these concepts are almost as limitless as the number of different businesses. Take our simple example of the Chemical and Consulting sales organizations where The Chemical salesperson sells to Distributors, and the Consulting salesperson sells to Clients. Essentially they both sell to Customers, they just call them different things.

We have handled these differences in the Sales Manager suite of products by allowing the user to define the Properties of any of their Opportunity data fields to correspond to one of the business principles mentioned above. We have defined 15 different business Properties as follows, with definitions and some examples of exactly what our customers have named these concepts on their own templates:

Product – Whatever it is you sell, we have labeled it as 'product'. (Names e.g. Product, service, item, unit)

Quantity – How many do you sell? (Names e.g. Quantity, amount, count, number of weeks, weeks, days, hours)

Discount – Not too much variety in naming on this one, and it is self-explanatory.

Price – What can we say? (Names e.g. Price, cost, rate, charge)

Booking Date – The Sales Manager products all work better and provide much more information if there is a date component to an Opportunity. We can age things, tell you when Opportunities are overdue, give you information on what will 'close' in a particular period…all sorts of things. (Names e.g. Booking Date, Order Date, Date Due, Delivery date, Completion date)

Stage – Most large sales deals break down into a series of stages, so this property of an Opportunity describes where you are in your particular sales cycle. (Names e.g. Stage, step, period, cycle-point, cycle)

Probability – One of the contentious properties of a sales deal is often summed up as "Well, if it's not yet complete, how complete is it?". A number of sales organization use the concept of "percentage completion", to estimate and predict sales revenues for upcoming quarters. This property is used to hold a percentage probability to indicate how complete a sales deal is…Of course, some other organizations, equally correct, would argue that there is no such thing as a partially completed deal, and Yoda-like, it is either Done or Not done! (Names e.g. Probability, likelihood, prediction, chance)

Territory – If your sales organization is broken down into any kind of sub units, then this property is used to identify to which sub-unit the opportunity is linked. (Names e.g. Territory, region, area, group, country, county, city, state; Samples e.g. Eastern Region, Western Region, Central Region…Internal Sales, Web Sales, External Sales, Contract Sales…North America, EMEA, South America, Asia-Pacific)

Type – If you categorize your customers into different groupings based on…well, based on whatever you want, then this property is associated with the field that describes that categorization. (Names e.g. Type, category, classification; Samples e.g. Fortune 500, Small Business, Public, Private…large, medium, small, individual)

Company – The name of the organization to which you are selling (e.g. Company, customer, client, organization)

Contact – The name of the primary person to whom you are selling at the Company. (e.g. Contact, customer name, buyer)

Role – The role or position of your primary contact within the Company/organization

Address – The address of your primary contact

Phone – The phone number(s) for your primary contact

Email - The email address(es) for your primary contact

When building a Template for your own business, one of the sections of the Data Types definition form allows you to associate any one of these Properties with one of your fields. If we look at our example Templates for the Chemical Business, we would assign the following Properties to the fields on that template:

Field               Property
Distributor            Company
Buyer               Contact
Delivery Date            Booking Date
Email               Email
Phone               Phone
Address               Address
Stage               Stage
Chance of Closing         Probability
Type of customer         Type

The following points should be noted about Properties:

Some of these fields (if specified) are actually used in a variety of calculations which provide other information about the Opportunity:

·	Revenue is calculated by Quantity * Price – Discount

·	Weighted Revenue is calculated by Revenue * Probability

·	If you don't want to supply any of these fields, that's OK, we actually don't force you to, we just want to know which ones you are using. Any and all of these can be left out altogether.

Whenever any of this information is printed on a report, the heading that you have chosen is printed appropriately. Thus, for example, if you have chosen to use the term Client for the field which has the Customer property, then Client will appear as the column heading on all of the reports where the Customer field is printed.

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