Opportunity

An Opportunity represents activities that will generate income for your organization.  These are prospective sales and deals that can be entered, tracked, and reported on as they move forward, giving you a picture of your business activities.

Unlike a simple sale where a person buys something, an Opportunity is designed to track the progress of particular sales activities.  For example, this may be for tracking progress on an attempt to upgrade the services that an existing client is using, or for the preparation and submission of a bid on a contract.  You can specify the value of the opportunity and probability of success, so you can identify what the high value opportunities are.  Specify an account for an opportunity, and the information will appear on the Opportunity tab for that account.  

Customize the Opportunity Object

This illustrates a simple Opportunity design.  You can customize the information in the fields to add your own opportunity types and the different stages each type moves through.  For example, you could have different types based on opportunities with new customers, existing customers, activities such as providing consulting services or product sales, and so on.  For each type of opportunity you would then specify the different stages, so you can see where the opportunity is and what needs to be done next.

If you want to change any of the details about the Opportunity, go to Setup > Development > Objects and click on the Opportunity object.  From there you can modify the fields, layout, user permissions, etc.

The Opportunity Logs tab can be used to record changes in the Opportunity.  Workflows can be used to update the logs automatically based on changes in status, value, etc.

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