Utilizing Salesforce Opportunities Correctly
Salesforce opportunities are a very frequent and abundant record type for most businesses. Given how much of a backbone CRM has become to modern business, and since most people use Salesforce (for good reason), certain types of CRM data are going to be common to departments who didn’t used to use CRM.
Marketers and sales people especially work with Salesforce opportunities, though the customer service department will deal with them as well in a somewhat diminished capacity. But, for those still learning about CRM, and aren’t familiar with certain terminology, it’s best to define it, and give a little advice about it.
An opportunity is a potential customer or marketing deal. It’s the second phase of evolution during customer experience, when an individual or organization has made contact with your company, and have moved from prospects (you’re unaware of these directly) to someone you can actually identify and contact back.
Whenever an opportunity is made, CRM will then track it, and will also track their conversion to customers, and calculate the different metrics that come from this, like lifetime values, annual recurring revenue, trends for lead conversion speeds and ratios etc.
Now, within Salesforce, this is just a record set. A row of values in a tabular database with a specific anatomy and design. Opportunities can be simple in shape, consisting of names or other identification, channel of communication, time, a log of what was discussed, and a contact entry or a series of them, with phone numbers, email addresses, social network IDs, or any number of things.
They can be customized as well, so other fields can exist, and some of the above don’t have to exist either. So, as far as advice goes for this sort of thing, make sure that your fields cover everything that counts, but don’t include extraneous data.
For example, if you’re not working with social media at all (making you foolish by the way), then a field with social media IDs or something of the sort would be extraneous.
Now, along with this, opportunities and leads both are fodder for marketing campaigns, such as email outreach, social media marketing campaigns and SEO campaigns alike.
This is usually in tandem with an integrated third party BI service, or an app that tracks the data within Salesforce, as well as email services like MailChimp and AWeber.
With that in mind, you’ll want to sort and prioritize both opportunities and leads alike, so that ones with the most valued criteria for pursuit are the first ones on the list for any automata that skims the tables of opportunities and leads, to contact or track and score for reactionary outreach.
Beyond that, most of the tasks performed with these kinds of records are just creation of them, and automatic processes, until they become customers. So, there’s not a lot of room for you to be able to do this wrong, because they can only be made to behave in such a way, and said way is the right way.
Salesforce opportunities are one of the meat and potatoes types of records in CRM, so you want to understand what they are. But don’t be nervous, because there’s really no way to use them wrong. get additional help on how to use salesforce page.
