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From some of the posts I’ve seen lately it seems that more Opportunity management is on Solve’s radar, at least I hope it is.
I have used other CRM’s in previous lives, for this life Solve is great, but I think it needs just a few more things around opportunity management to take it to the next level. Just wanted to throw around a few suggestions, and to see what people think.
1) I have always considered there to be 3 types of deals: 1) Deals you Win, Deals you Loose, and Deals that Die; ie the prospect does nothing and doesn’t buy a solution from anyone. Currently Solve has the pull down that lets you choose ‘Discussion, Pending, Won, Lost, On hold’. It would be great to add ‘Dead’ to the list for the above reason. I think it is important to give us the ability to distinguish between deals that you legitimately lost to a competitor, and deals that just never materialized as they may need to be analyzed and handled differently by the company.
2) Show/filter deals by Probability or Stage: add a slider bar to the menu bar in the Opportunity Activities window so that we can filter by a range of Probabilities or Stages: ie Opps between 50-70, or 80-100 etc. Right now when you sort the column, it still maintains the Closing in xx weeks as the primary grouping mechanism, and when you have lots of deals makes it awkward to view your business an doesn’t really work. (I don’t really understand why the restriction on grouping by the Closing in xx Weeks is there but….)
3) Ability to put multiple deals in one Opportunity. Example: my prospect is going to buy a yearly software license for $10,000 and a one time install of $4000. It would be nice to have both of them in the same Opportunity since they go together yet are separate items. Right now you have to have 2 Opps for this. Definitely not a deal breaker, but a nice to have
4) Ability to truly sort by each column, not have the Closing in XX Weeks be the first and only reference point (this also goes for the Next Actions Assigned to report)
5) Search box like in the Contact screen. (For those of us running Solve in the Chrome application shortcut, there is no native search feature.)
6) Better projections etc built around the length of the Opportunity and the close date or effective date (ie you might close a sale in Jan, but it wont be implemented until May). I’m personally not too worried about this type of detailed reporting, since this starts to get into the management heavy type of sales structure and the current setup is great for small businesses and teams. But a bit of projections etc could be helpful and useful for some people to be able to see and calculate the impact in a given quarter, or year etc
7) Ability to put a task within the Opportunity (or any activity actually)
Just my seven cents worth, would be glad to hear other peoples thoughts in this area
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Thanks Dave! You’re right, opportunity management seems to stand out as being something folks have a passion for (the reasons would seem pretty obvious). We appreciate the ideas you’ve shared. Are they in a particular order e.g. importance etc?
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Sorry for the late reply (I know I can just sense the disappointment!).
To answer your question here is my personal order of importance:
1)
2)
4) - although I have found a bit of a work around for 2) and 4) in order to unclutter my screen. I now only put the first date of the quarter (Jan1, Apr1, July1, Oct1) so I have 4 groups in the year, as the closing date. I suppose you could also do it just by month, to give you twelve groups. I would challenge anyone who can pin point the exact closing date on a deal!! There is simply too much that can happen. Sure some industries might be like that, but the vast majority are not, never have, never will be like that. Maybe this idea will help some others. But just like in the Next Actions Assigned to, having the system lock the sorting results to date first isn’t very practical in some instances (have rambled on this before so won’t bore you!)
7)
3)
5)
6)
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dave@vm - Jul 29, 2010 06:38am Sorry for the late reply (I know I can just sense the disappointment!).
To answer your question here is my personal order of importance:
1)
2)
4) - although I have found a bit of a work around for 2) and 4) in order to unclutter my screen. I now only put the first date of the quarter (Jan1, Apr1, July1, Oct1) so I have 4 groups in the year, as the closing date. I suppose you could also do it just by month, to give you twelve groups. I would challenge anyone who can pin point the exact closing date on a deal!! There is simply too much that can happen. Sure some industries might be like that, but the vast majority are not, never have, never will be like that. Maybe this idea will help some others. But just like in the Next Actions Assigned to, having the system lock the sorting results to date first isn’t very practical in some instances (have rambled on this before so won’t bore you!)
7)
3)
5)
6)
I looked at the list and find my priorities being the exact same. And yes I am a different Dave. I especially like the idea of having close date set by quarter or month instead of date
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These are the Daves I know. 
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Engineering SpecialOps - Jul 30, 2010 10:12am These are the Daves I know. ;)
They tend to travel in packs and gang up on unsuspecting app devs. ;)
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Indeed you will find us waiting in the shadows just beyond the tree line…. 
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Engineering SpecialOps - Jul 30, 2010 10:12am These are the Daves I know. ;)
Well, how about these Daves, do you know them too?
A little silly Canadian comedy from the 80’s for all you non-Canadians out there
http://mysp.ac/cx5sWt
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Just wanted to throw another idea out there, and see what people think:
In the Activities dashboard, it might be great to be able to filter/show the Tasks either by Project or Contact somehow, or if one of my wishes above comes true (adding a Task to an Opportunity), being able to filter those out as well, here is my reasoning:
Let’s say you have 100 leads, or Opportunities to follow up with. Currently I just have a note in a general To Do list under the Company or Contact record that says: ‘Follow up with Bob’ and if it’s time dependent I put the date.
As you can imagine, these are such mundane tasks, that having tons of them showing in the Activities dashboard clutters the rest of the info, whereas if we could assign a Task to an Opportunity and somehow filter those on/off that would be great.
To date the Opportunity activity in Solve has been mostly treated like all the others, but it’s such an important activity for everyones business, for obvious reasons, that I think it should become a bit more ‘special’ in that regard.
With all that said, I have made a work around, I have added a custom form field to the Opportunity activity called: ‘Follow up date’ and this does show in the Activities dashboard. This works OK, but the above idea might work out even better. Or a combo of both, being able to truly see a Task assigned to an Opportunity when in the Show Opportunities Dashboard and have it not show (or turn on/off) in the Next Actions Assigned to area.
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New to Solve 360 - less than a week, but would agree with the general thread about strengthening the handling of Opportunities in general and agree that there should be a way to cause focus on Opportunities tasks versus, still important, administration, operational and general project tasks.
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I have been using solve for over a year. We would use it more if opportunity reports were not constrained by sorting by date.
Can the date sort (closing <90 days etc.) be removed or bypassed in any way?
For example, I just want a clean report of opportunities totalled by who owns them…
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+1 to robertpye’s suggestion. This has been begged for in another thread as well. Seems like a simple thing to implement.
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Yes, good points, thanks.
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dave@vm - Aug 04, 2010 09:27am Engineering SpecialOps - Jul 30, 2010 10:12am These are the Daves I know. ;)
Well, how about these Daves, do you know them too?
A little silly Canadian comedy from the 80’s for all you non-Canadians out there
http://mysp.ac/cx5sWt
Missed this. Yup, good research Dave! Kids In the Hall were the correct reference :)
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+1 to the suggestions here - especially adding a “Dead” stage to the opportunity (and being able to filter those out in Reporting) and adding a Task/Next Action to the Opportunity activity.
I added a Custom Field called “Opportunity Contact” because I may have several people related to a Project or Company that the Opportunity is in, and need to quickly know my main point of contact for the opportunity (who to follow up with for that Next Action). It would be great if there was a way to make this Custom Field a typical “Contact” field so that I can search and add from my Contacts database. Currently I type the person’s name in, but then have to leave the Opportunity, go to Contacts, type in the person’s name, and then look in their record for contact info (email, phone number, etc.) or make any notes there. Would be a lot quicker to just click that Contact’s name from the Opportunity activity field.
Thanks for considering!
Sharon
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