On D-Tools Cloud, you start the workflow for carrying out a Project or a 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 contact details of the customer, site details, and the estimated budget for the requirement. Cloud also lets you classify opportunities by Market, Sales Lead, and Project Type (Retrofit, Remodel, Reconstruction) so you can derive rich insights from the Cloud Analytics engine and keep track of your sales pipeline.
Types of Opportunities
Cloud allows the creation of two types of opportunities:
Project Opportunity
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
Service Opportunity is meant to be used when you want to propose Service Plans as an afterthought for projects that are already complete or in progress. Cloud also allows for using Service opportunities for providing 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. This can be done using "Opportunity Stages." An opportunity stage is an indication of 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 > Site Visit Completed > Quote Ready > Proposal Sent > Won.
Cloud provides some default opportunity stages. You can customize them as needed.
Check out this article for more details about customizing opportunity stages.
Opportunity stages make it possible to constantly monitor the sales pipeline from the Cloud Dashboard and the Sales reports available on Cloud.
Working on opportunities
Once an opportunity is created, it has all the details of the client, the work site, and the scope of the resulting project. You can always change or update them as needed in the Opportunity Details view.
For a full view of all opportunities in your Cloud account, you have the option to switch between a Kanban Board and a List View.
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 let them 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 other's 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.
Stage, Owner, Building Type, Project Type, and Date filters.
Winning the opportunity
Cloud has a distinct stage "Won" to let you tell 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.
This is an example of marking a Project 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.
Check out this article for more details.
Opportunity defaults
Before adding opportunities to Cloud, you may want to check the defaults we provide for managing opportunities. These defaults are located under "Settings > Opportunities."
If they don't suit your needs, you can update them as needed. This way you can start tracking the correct Sales metrics from day one.
