What is Opportunity Management?

Answer

• An opportunity represents possibility for sale of services or products.
• A bid invitation, a sales deal or a trade fair can result into opportunity.
• Also Opportunity can be created with the Hot Lead, which is a business transaction in the Marketing process.
• SAP CRM offers Opportunity as a business transaction document that presents various aspects of the sales prospects (customers) such as the products and services which they have requested, their budget, expected sales volume and option to estimate the sales probability.

With SAP CRM's Opportunity Management, an organization can maintain and track a sales project at different stages. Thus it provides an option for analysis and optimization of customer-specific business process.
 

• For a Sales Cycle, various sales stages can be configured in customizing as per the customer-specific business process.
• Each sales stage can have planned activities which can be activated by the sales employee using the Sales Assistant.

Mainly an opportunity document in SAP CRM contains data related to the Sales cycle, forecast data, classification of opportunity, product data (maintained in Items Assignment Block), and information related to activities, competitor products, sale team, attachments, etc.

• Change in sales stage for an Opportunity result in calculation of the forecast data, thus the completion of a Sales stage determines the probability of sale.
• Forecast data contains the expected volume of the sale in terms of product quantity and product value.

An opportunity can be classified based upon the Opportunity Group (such as existing customer or new customer), its origin (such as trade fair), and its priority.

• These data could be used in the analysis of the Opportunity management in your company.

In product data (maintained within Items assignment block), expected product quantity and product value can be maintained at each item level.
 

• This also reflects in the expected value of the Opportunity in the forecast data as a complete document.
• It is possible to save an Opportunity with incorrect product id or description. This is useful in the cases where product information is not clear at the early stage of sales cycle.

CRM also provides functionality to search and maintain the competitor product in the Opportunity document. This relationship between products needs to be maintained in CRM product master data.

As displayed in the above create page images, SAP CRM Sales offers Sales Stage History which presents data related to each sales stage which are completed for the Opportunity. Along with this, SAP CRM is also integrated with SAP BI for the analysis of the Opportunity Management data at different Sales stages and from the forecast data.