Sea of Knowledge

5 Business Benefits of Using Opportunities in Salesforce

Salesforce CRM is a sales and service tool designed to supercharge your sales efforts with the ability to track and respond to thousands of sales leads in real-time. 

One of Salesforce’s best features for businesses is Salesforce’s Opportunity Stages. Opportunities in Salesforce allow sales reps to track potential sales from qualified leads and optimize their sales funnel to improve conversion rates. 

To better understand how to unleash the power of Opportunities in Salesforce, we’ve provided this brief guide to help you understand what Salesforce Opportunity Stages are and what they do. 

In addition, we’ll discuss how Salesforce Opportunities benefit your business and provide a quick tutorial on how to integrate this data into HubSpot if you are a HubSpot CRM user. 

What Is an Opportunity in Salesforce?

An opportunity in Salesforce tracks revenue opportunities between deal stages in your sales pipeline. Once a lead becomes qualified, they are considered an opportunity because they have a high potential to make a purchase or conversion with your business. 

Salesforce Opportunities enable teams to track the progress of active deals in your pipeline, forecast potential sales from a deal, and monitor bandwidth between sales members to act on certain deals.

Within Salesforce’s Opportunity tab, administrators can create Salesforce Opportunity Stages that walk sales reps through a custom sales funnel. 

Salesforce provides a picklist of stages that run from Prospecting to Closed Won/Lost and allows users to assign Probabilities, Type values, and Forecast results based on each stage of the pipeline and the opportunities likelihood to convert. 

Furthermore, in the Opportunities tab, users can upload files, such as contract templates and client forms, and assign tasks to sales reps to streamline their sales process.

With this in mind, let’s walk you through how to set up and manage Salesforce’s Opportunity Stages. 

How to Manage Opportunity Stages in Salesforce 

To create an Opportunity Stage in Salesforce, navigate to:

Settings > Setup (or Edit Object for Existing Opportunities) > Object Manager > Opportunity Object > Fields & Relationships > Stage

Once on this form, you’ll be able to choose from a picklist with pre-defined stages built into the Salesforce CRM. 

For example, a typical Salesforce Opportunity Stage funnel would represent something like:

Discovery > Proposal Requested > Proposal Provided > Pending Signature > Closed

Using the Kanban view, located under the Grid view in the upper right corner, you’ll see all sales prospects in every stage of your sales funnel. You can click on each opportunity and view urgent tasks that require action. 

Once an opportunity has completed a stage in your sales funnel, simply click and drag them to the next stage to advance them down your sales funnel. 

Inside each stage, you’ll be able to click on an active opportunity and assign tasks, upload relevant account information, view their budget, and view past account actions that led to a particular stage. 

Now that you understand the basics of Salesforce Opportunities and Opportunity Stages, let’s discuss some additional benefits that Salesforce Opportunities provide for businesses. 

5 Benefits of Opportunities in Salesforce

  1. Predict Revenue from a Potential Sale

    One of the best features of Salesforce Opportunities is assigning and predicting the total amount of revenue generated from an active deal. 

    For example, Opportunity Amounts are generated based on the sum of products you’ve manually associated with an Opportunity. This field helps businesses prioritize opportunities with larger sales potential. 

  2. Forecast Revenue Numbers for Your Entire Organization

    Furthermore, we can zoom out our focus from a single sales opportunity to a wide range of active deals to predict potential revenue numbers across your business using Salesforce’s Collaborative Forecasting tab

    Salesforce’s Collaborative Forecasting tab relies heavily on aggregated data from current Salesforce Opportunities to predict future revenue. 

    Users can estimate their potential revenue and forecasts based on forecast categories, product groups, and a set period. 

    Forecasting with opportunities allows businesses to pivot toward strategies that yield them the most potential revenue, whether it’s spending more time nurturing bigger accounts or finding ways to speed up sales processes.

  3. Track Deal Changes to Take Action

    Salesforce will highlight any opportunity changes, such as any changes to opportunity amount or close date, to help sales reps prioritize deals that require action. For example, under the My Opportunities tab in Table View, Salesforce will highlight any close date changes or deal amount changes with an arrow. Users can hover over these deal changes to see who changed a deal and when deals were changed.

    Furthermore, by switching to Kanban View, users can hover over active deals to view changes, see what action is required, and view which Opportunity Stage they’ve advanced or retreated from to see what deals require urgent action. 

  4. Track Competitors in Opportunities

    One insightful feature of Salesforce’s Opportunity Tab is the ability to track and attach competitors to active opportunities

    Administrators with edit access can either manually add a competitor to an existing Opportunity or choose from a pre-set picklist of competitors attached to future opportunities. This field allows sales reps to track active competitors through sales and view their strengths and weaknesses for selling points.

    Furthermore, sales reps who lose a sale to a competitor can easily insert this information in a Closed Lost picklist that allows your organization to track the number of sales lost to competitors to modify your sales strategies. 

  5. Track Products with Opportunity Products 

    Finally, Salesforce Opportunity Products are a great out-of-the-box tool that allows sales reps to input products and quantities associated with a sale to help them view sales amounts. This feature helps with product reporting and enables sales teams to view which products are selling.

In addition, custom price books can be used to add Products to Opportunities to adjust to territory or team-based variable pricing.

As a bonus, quantity schedules and revenue forecasts can also be set up to report on sales that occur periodically. For example, you could set up a quantity schedule to track products that ship out monthly and a revenue forecast that tracks services like yearly maintenance schedules.

Integrating Salesforce Opportunities with HubSpot Deals

The native HubSpot Salesforce integration provides access to revenue and deal stage reporting for your marketing and sales teams. Furthermore, syncing Salesforce Opportunities to HubSpot Deals is incredibly easy, especially if your team uses HubSpot for everything else outside of sales. 

To sync Salesforce Opportunities to Deals in HubSpot, navigate to:

Marketplace > Manage > Connected Apps > Salesforce > Click Sync Deals

To ensure all new and pre-existing opportunities are synced into HubSpot, import Opportunities from Salesforce. Navigate to:

Contacts > Import > Start an Import > Integrations > Salesforce Records > Opportunities > Review > Begin Import

Managing Salesforce Opportunities is incredibly easy and intuitive. You will gain valuable insights into sales-related processes that yield the best results and be able to act on sales that are most important to your bottom line. 

To better understand Salesforce and how to harness its potential, contact us at Coastal Consulting for your free consultation. Our team has quick turnaround times within 10 business days and can you on ways to better put Salesforce to task for your business. 

Additionally, we offer services to integrate Salesforce with HubSpot to help you centralize all of your data in one location. Schedule a consultation with us to learn how to utilize Salesforce and HubSpot to power your business.