On D-Tools Cloud, you initiate the workflow for a project or service contract by creating an "Opportunity." Opportunity is how you add a qualified sales lead to Cloud, create a quote for equipment and labor, and approach the customer with a proposal.
When creating an opportunity, you can add the customer's contact details, site details, and the estimated budget for the requirement. Cloud also allows you to classify opportunities by market, sales lead, and project type (Retrofit, Remodel, Reconstruction) to derive rich insights from the Cloud Analytics engine and track your sales pipeline.
Types of opportunities
Cloud allows the creation of two types of opportunities:
Project opportunity
A project opportunity is comprehensive in that it allows for adding products, labor to install and program products, labor for other activities, and the service plans to maintain the products.
The project opportunity, when "Won," results in the creation of a Cloud project.
Service opportunity
A service opportunity is intended for use when you want to propose service plans as an afterthought for projects that are already complete or in progress. Cloud also allows for the use of service opportunities to provide services without a project associated with it.
The service opportunity, when "Won," results in the creation of a service contract on Cloud.
Opportunity stages
You will need a way to track the progress of the opportunities during your sales meetings. On Cloud, you can do this using "Opportunity Stages." An opportunity stage indicates a certain level of progress on the opportunity.
As your salespeople work on the opportunities, they can be moved through the different stages based on their progress.
For example, a typical set of opportunity stages could be: New Lead > Site Visit Completed > Quoting > Negotiating > Signed Proposal.
Cloud provides some default opportunity stages. You can customize them as needed.
Learn more about customizing the opportunity stages.
Here is a screenshot with 6 opportunity stages and 3 stage groups.
Opportunity stages make it possible to constantly monitor the sales pipeline from the Cloud Dashboard and the Sales reports available on Cloud.
Work on opportunities
Once an opportunity is created, it contains all the necessary details, including the client, work site, and scope of the resulting project. You can always change or update them in the Opportunity Details view.
You can switch between a Kanban Board and a List View to get a full view of all opportunities in your Cloud account.
To work on opportunities and win them quickly, you have options to:
Assign opportunities to different team members and let them work on quoting and proposal creation for their opportunity.
Share the opportunity with multiple team members to enable them to collaborate and delegate tasks using notes, to-dos, and real-time Chat.
For effective management of opportunities within your team, you have options to:
Restrict your Salespeople from viewing others' opportunities by assigning them the "View Opportunities > Mine" permission.
Eventually, when you have added a lot of opportunities and are trying to find a specific opportunity, you can use the following to find it:
Search by opportunity name or quote number.
Sort by opportunity name, client name, priority, and a few more parameters.
Opportunity type, stage, building type, market section, project type, and date filters.
Mark the opportunity as "Won"
Cloud has a distinct stage, "Won," which allows you to notify users in your account that the customer has accepted the proposal. Once you mark an opportunity as Won, Cloud will prompt you to do one of the following:
Create a project for a project opportunity.
Create a service contract for a service opportunity.
Here is a screenshot of the pop-up that appears when a project opportunity is marked as Won.
Learn more about how to mark an opportunity as won.
If, for some reason, the customer declined the proposal, you can mark the opportunity as "Lost" with an appropriate reason. Cloud will collect the 'Lost Reason" data for opportunities and provide insights to help you work on improving the closing ratio.
Learn more about how to capture and analyze lost opportunities.
Opportunity defaults
Before adding opportunities to Cloud, check our defaults for managing opportunities. These defaults are located under "Settings > Opportunity."
You can update them if they don't suit your needs. This way, you can start tracking the correct sales metrics from the very beginning.