Salesforce.com For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 10

Tracking Opportunities

In This Chapter

Demystifying opportunities

Creating new opportunities

Changing opportunity records

Organizing opportunity lists and contact roles

Using Chatter to follow opportunities

Your sales pipeline is the lifeblood of your business. It’s the list of deals that can help you achieve your sales targets. But try as you might, you can probably never close every deal in your pipeline. Things happen: Budgets get slashed, projects get tabled, you lose to a competitor, decision makers change. So, you need enough deals to give yourself the chance to hit and exceed your revenue goals in a given time frame.

An opportunity in Salesforce is a sales deal that you want to track to an ultimate conclusion (ideally, a win). The opportunity record has tools to help you efficiently track and close a sale. By using Salesforce, you can manage more opportunities at the same time and pursue each opportunity with greater precision. For example, if you’re a Salesforce ...