In the sales funnel, Leads are at the top, the beginning. As a salesperson, you’re starting to pull potential customers in, gathering information about and nurturing them until they have a bit more promise as potential customers. This is when a Lead moves further down the sales funnel and into the categorization of an Opportunity.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads→

Creating Opportunities

There are two ways we can create opportunities in the system. The first approach is creating an Opportunity manually from scratch. This may happen in instances like when a potential customer pops up on your radar who is already invested enough to jump right past the Lead stage, or if you have a current customer interested in other products. You can add a new opportunity from the Opportunity List.

When you create an Opportunity from scratch, you will have key fields you have to enter for the record to save, and these required fields (which can be customized by a system admin or your Partner to meet the needs of your sales process) ensure complete data for things like reporting. Generally, though, you’ll want to enter as much data in this stage as you can to help get the best handle on the Opportunity as possible. The Opportunity record holds a lot of fields and subgrids you and add data to, such as:

• Associated Contacts and Accounts

• Products

• Owner/Assignments (to teams or individual users), if applicable

• Estimated Revenue

• Estimated Closing Date

• Location

• Competitors

• Stakeholders

• Sales Team

• And more

When the Opportunity is created, you’ll have the Business Process Flow at the top of the page, where we can see how long the record has been active and which stage the Opportunity is at in the sales pipeline. The Timeline will also begin storing records that are tracked to the Opportunity, such as Activities, Tasks, and Emails.

The other approach for creating Opportunities is to qualify a Lead, which graduates it to higher permanence in the system. When you qualify a Lead in Dynamics 365, the system creates a new Opportunity, transferring the data from that Lead record. This removes manual duplicate data entry you may otherwise have had to do in systems that don’t link Leads and Opportunities. In addition, your original Lead record isn’t gone—it’s retained in the system and accessible, now closed as “qualified,” for historical and reporting purposes.

Tour an Opportunity record

An Opportunity record has many distinctions from a Lead record, and just like most aspects of Microsoft CRM apps, the base opportunity record is highly customizable. What you get out-of-the-box includes (*transfers from Lead record if present):

1) Topic*: The topic should be sufficiently specific to distinguish the Opportunity from others.

2) Contact*: If the lead is not already associated with a Contact, qualifying it to an Opportunity will create one.

3) Account*: If the lead is not already associated with an Account, qualifying it to an Opportunity will create one.

4) Estimated Close Date: The approximate day that the salesperson thinks the opportunity will be closed and (hopefully) won.

5) Estimated Revenue: The estimated revenue can be based on products added to the opportunity or written in manually, depending on your setup in the app.

6) Owner*: An individual or Team can be the owner of an opportunity. The owner can be assigned by management and reassigned as needed.

7) Pipeline stage: Which step of the Business Process Flow is the Opportunity in? The out-of-the-box process bar at the top of your screen is the same throughout the sales pipeline. During the Lead stage, the flow was in the “Qualify” stage, but after qualifying the lead, the stage moves to “Develop.”

8) Timeline*: Tasks, Activities, Notes, and Emails (if you’re using the Dynamics 365 Add-in for Outlook) can all be tracked to the Opportunity. Everything tracked to the Lead will also transfer here.

9) Products*: Under the “Product line item” tab. The product (with any price adjustments) will transfer from the Lead record and rename to include the word “opportunity” in the title. This is not a brand new product, despite its name change. The stage is added to the product title to indicate that the line was pulled from the Lead, rather than the Product Catalogue (and that includes any price adjustments). This reduces quote price changes and errors.

Common Customizations

Like the whole system, the Opportunity form is highly customizable, which allows you to build a perfect form for your sales process. Here are some common customizations we see in the Opportunity form:

A Probability or Confidence Score: A percentage or other indication of how certain it is that the Opportunity will be won. We see something like a confidence score in the Lead record Ratings of Hot, Warm, or Cold to indicate how responsive, interested, and immediate the lead is. Probability is often set programmatically based off of the sales stage the Opportunity is in.

Projected Revenue (or weighted revenue): Calculated by multiplying the estimated revenue by the probability, this number indicates a portion of the total estimated revenue of the Opportunity while also accounting for the Opportunity being a potential, but not guaranteed, deal.

Business Process Flow: You can add, remove, and alter the steps of the Business Process Flow to work within your sales process. You can include several steps for the Opportunity stage, for instance, or change the info you need to gather and enter in the stage dropdown to move the Opportunity to the next stage. You can add steps where the Opportunity moves to another department for date entry/gathering, then moves back to the Sales department. You could even create several Business Process Flows based on what type of Lead/Opportunity you are working with (if you tend to approach some leads/opportunities very differently than others), which you can assign when first creating the lead.

Sales Pipeline Chart: This is a visual way to summarize and understand the status of your sales funnel: who is in the funnel, where are they, what does your estimated revenue look like, etc. You can look at the sales funnel for just yourself, the whole department, or even a team. The sales pipeline chart is customizable because it populates based on whichever view you have selected. If you need refresher on the View selector and how to create custom views, we’ve got you covered with this blog→

Next Steps

Every sales process is different, but Opportunities must be nurtured to the point that they go one of two ways:

1. The Opportunity might be lost midway through stage of the sales funnel. Perhaps they are no longer interested or it has been determined that the company/product is not a good fit for them. In this instance, we close the Opportunity as “Lost.” We can always view and reopen the opportunity if needed.

2. You nurture the Opportunity to the point where you they are ready to make a move. In this instance, you would create a Sales Quote for them, which they will either accept or reject. If they accept the quote, the Opportunity will be closed as “Won.” And if they deny the quote, you can renegotiate the quote or the Opportunity can be marked “Lost.”

If you use your CRM to create Quotes and Orders, then a Quote will be both an extension of the Opportunity stage of the sales process and a new record. So, the next blog in this “Exploring the sales process” series will focus on creating and revising Quotes, activating a Quote, and closing the Opportunity.

Check out our next blog in the series to learn about the Quote and Order steps of the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales!