Creating an opportunity

There are two ways of creating opportunities:

• For a new customer: We saw how this works in Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Leads, where an opportunity is created upon lead conversion. Since leads are potential clients, this is how you create an opportunity and work it until you close the first sale.
• For an existing customer: If you already have an account created for an organization, navigate to that organization and create the opportunity for a potential sale.

Let's see how the second option works.

Navigate to the existing GenePoint account and scroll down to the related Opportunities section. Click on New to create a new opportunity. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Clicking on this button takes you to the opportunity creation screen, as you can see in the following screenshot:

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, there are several important fields to fill out:

1. Opportunity Name: You should include a name that lets you know what you are selling.
2. Account Name: The account name automatically populates from the account that the opportunity relates to.
3. Type: This can be a new or existing customer.
4. Lead Source: Where this lead originated.
5. Amount: How much the sale is worth. This is updated when you add products in the next step.
6. Close Date: When you expect the deal to close.
7. Stage: What stage this opportunity is in. We will cover the different stages in detail in the next section.
8. Probability: This is auto-populated and ties into forecasting, which we will cover later on in this chapter in the Using forecasting section.

There is also a campaign field—which is optional—here to tie the opportunity to a marketing campaign. This is to show the campaign source for this opportunity if there is one. Clicking Save creates the opportunity.

In this section, we learned how to create an opportunity. Next, we will look at the opportunity stages and the sales path, as well as how they contribute to working an opportunity.