You already learned that opportunities are used to manage potential sales and they typically have more potential than a lead, so in the first step of this activity, you will explore working with opportunities.

Creating Opportunities

Users can create opportunities manually or can be converted from a lead or other activity. If your organisation uses leads, you’ll often convert leads directly into opportunities.

In other situations, you may just create a new opportunity for an existing account or contact or create an opportunity based upon an activity that has just occurred. As is the case system-wide, there may also be a need where data records are imported into the system.

Opportunity Status

Opportunity records can have a status of open, won or lost. Within Dynamics 365 for Sales, by default, opportunity records are saved with the status value of open.

Open opportunities are conventionally used to represent potential sales, and will often have sales processes associated with them. In addition, they can be modified as necessary.

When an opportunity is marked as won, this indicates the customer has decided to move forward with the placement of an order or has signed a contract to provide services.

Customers often change their minds. They might have indicated that they are not interested in a product or service, but then decide that they want to continue with the sale. If an opportunity is marked as lost, it can later be reopened if needed.

Deleting Opportunities

Opportunity records can be deleted by users with sufficient security privileges. It is important to note that deleting an opportunity record, also deletes any associated activities and notes.

As a general rule, it is better to close opportunities as lost rather than delete them.

Closing Opportunities

When closing an opportunity, all open activities associated with that opportunity will automatically be resolved. It is good practice to action and resolve all activities before closing the opportunity.

Your Task

What do you think it takes to qualify a lead as ‘won’ in terms of your own business processes?