Accounts/contacts vs Opportunities

[pwagorn]

I'm having a tough time trying to figure out how we should be entering our information as a potential sale progresses.

We are a business that sells a service, with a complex sale. Our sales process goes like this:

- talk to prospective clients (leads), convince them of the value
- contract negotiation
-signed as client

THEN we have opportunities that fall within our client agreement, with little negotiation.

Most of the sales process happens in setting up a new client, not in the individual opportunities.

My question is, how to get that sales process into sugar. Typically, I would think I would want to put the "sales stage" into either the account or contact record, but there isn't anything there for that.

We had the idea of creating an opportunity for every new prospective client, keeping track of the sales stage in the opportunity record... The problem with this is that it increases the work (now we have to create a contact, account, opportunity for every new person we talk to). Also, it creates a 'messy' opportunities database, with prospective clients as opportunities, and also real business opportunities for each client also entered as opportunities.

Is there a better way to do this?

Our client signup is the most intensive, complicated part of our business & really needs to be tracked & reported on. the sales opportunities for each client are much less complex, require little negotiation, etc.

Think of us as a consulting company - the sales process is complex with many stages, but once the client is signed, the 'opportunities' are fairly straightforward... we need to track the prospecting seperately that the actual business.

[dtokeefe]

Hi,

That is a really interesting question that many of our clients have also faced. Some suggestions:

1. Establish Lead conversion criteria
   -Be rigorous in qualification: Intention, Budget, Timeframe
2. Use Opportunities for the contract sale
   -Establish standard values for contracts, so your pipeline and forecasting make sense
   -Use the pipeline and forecast only for contracts, not the products sold within contracts
3. Use Products for the sales post-contract
   -Use Reports to keep track of sales and projected sales of Products.

Of course, every business is unique. Please feel free to call or Skype (dtokeefe) me to discuss your project.

Best regards,

David

[blak3r]

Use Opportunities for the contract sale
-Establish standard values for contracts, so your pipeline and forecasting make sense
-Use the pipeline and forecast only for contracts, not the products sold within contracts

Did you mean to say "Quotes" instead of "Contracts"? As far as I know, you can't connect products to contracts.

Isn't the forecast module designed to only work with Opportunities? Are you implying build your own forecasting?


I use sugar 6.0 pro so maybe you're using community edition + some sales add-on?

[dtokeefe]

Hi,

I understood that you sell 2 things:

1. An ongoing services contract (long sales cycle)
2. Products under the ongoing contract (short sales cycle)

You could use Opportunities for the sales pipleline related to services contracts, giving each services contract an estimated value during the sales process.

You could then use the Products module, maybe also with Quotes, to manage the sales of actual products.

Best regards,

David