Introduction
Opportunity management is a forecasting solution that provides you the ability to standardize or tailor-make the sales processes to manage and track all kinds of business deals. One of the best parts of this functionality is that it helps you to evaluate the financial budget and risks that could impact the deals, which in turn allows you to keep a close eye on deals that truly deserve your time and attention. The easy accessibility to deal-related information, which is stored in a central location together with the workflow management functionality, allows for efficient handling of your business opportunities and easier allocation of your resources at each stage of the sales cycle.
An improvement has been made to allow you to reject the requests generated for a sales cycle of an opportunity without causing the opportunity to be lost. This provides the flexibility for you to deal with the requests separately from your opportunity, as the reason for rejection may not be solely due to the opportunity being lost. Simply set your opportunity to the Lost status and even reopen it later, if required, via the opportunity card.
Getting to know why opportunities are lost and to whom the deals are lost to can provide a great insight to the workforce in your organization. The information can be used as means to identify and sharpen the areas or skills where they are lacking, as well as identify a different approach that can showcase the competitive advantage that your organization possesses to seal the deals. With that in mind, you can now make it mandatory for users to fill in the reason the opportunity was lost and the competitor the deal was lost to. This provides you with an option to have a complete overview of the information when viewing the pivot analysis for opportunities. For more information, see Viewing Sales Cycle Reports using Pivot Analysis.
Menu path
- Customers/Setup/Opportunity management/Settings
- Go to Customers/Reports/Opportunity management/Search, define the relevant settings, and then click Show. Next, click the hyperlink under the Opportunity: Description column.
What has been changed
Managing opportunities
An opportunity is never lost when you reject a request in any stage of a sales cycle of an opportunity. Thus, the following improvements have been made:
a) You can quickly close tabs on lost deals with the Lost button that has been implemented in the opportunity card. This button is available only when the opportunity is in the Undecided status and if you have the rights to edit the opportunity card. In addition, the status of all requests generated for the sales cycle of the opportunity that have not been completed will automatically be set to Rejected when you click Lost. See the following screen for an example:
b) Due to volatile market conditions, the success factors of your deals are ever-changing. Thus, it is always possible for you to work on lost opportunities and overturn the failure. With this, a Reopen button is implemented in the opportunity card. This button is available only when an opportunity is in the Lost status and if you have the rights to edit the opportunity card. By reopening an opportunity, its status will be set to Undecided and the request at the latest stage of the sales cycle associated with the opportunity will be reopened.
Mandatory information for lost opportunities
New settings have been added to the general settings for opportunities. These settings make it compulsory for you to fill in the reason the opportunity was lost and the competitor it was lost to when you set an opportunity to the Lost status. See the following screen for an example:
If you have selected Mandatory at Reason lost and/or Lost to competitor, upon clicking Lost in the opportunity card, a screen is displayed to prompt you to fill in the required information. See the following screen for an example:
For more information, see Defining Settings for Opportunities and Auto-generating Opportunity Codes.
With the settings already available in the general settings, you will no longer be able to customize the advanced settings for Reason lost and Lost to competitor from the opportunity card (by clicking 
Customize in the opportunity card, and then clicking Advanced) as the fields have been removed.
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