in this video i'm going to be explaining opportunities inside of salesforce i'm going to be explaining what they are how they work how to use the pipeline and also how to close your opportunities as hopefully one or unfortunately lost as the case may be welcome crm crew my name is nick just before we get into the video if you need any further training help with salesforce please check out our website below we provide bespoke crm training for businesses around the world so without further ado let's get straight into the video so once you log into salesforce you are going to come to the home screen now of course in this video we're discussing opportunities so let's go to the top here and head over to our opportunities area now firstly you may be wondering what exactly are opportunities now opportunities inside of salesforce is the selling area the main sales hub inside of your system this is where we're going to manage our sales we're going to manage each stage of our sales process and then we can hopefully close our sale as one or as the case may be close it as lost if we do not make the sale now you may be wondering what's the difference between leads and opportunities leads is the very very very beginning of any sale and i've done a video on that so please check that out if you're unsure the opportunities area is really the main selling area of the system okay so as you can see i've got a few example opportunities here and they've already been added in case you're not familiar with opportunities you can change the view and this applies for anywhere inside of the salesforce system so this is all my opportunities and we've got a few different fields here or columns we've got the amount so what is the value of the opportunity the date that is anticipated to be closed we've got the different stages which i'll walk you through later on in this video the probability which is directly associated with the stage and we've got the type so whether it's existing or new business and the lead source as well so where did this particular sale come from or where was the lead that got us to this point where did it originate from okay so like i said the opportunities is where we manage all of our sales now obviously you want to be managing your sales so what we need to do is create a new opportunity by pressing the new button in the right hand corner here and this is where we can go ahead and fill out some information now you may not need to do this if you are converting a lead to an opportunity okay but if you are just going straight to the opportunities area which is absolutely acceptable there's no reason why you can't do that especially if it's repeat business then this is what we would do we just create a new opportunity we give it a name so i'm just going to call this crm crew and then you may if you'd like to add some additional information so maybe the product that you're selling for example i'm just going to call the crm crew example for the video and then we need to associate an account with the opportunity so i've already added crm crew as an account to salesforce so we'll just make that association and then on the right hand side we need to add a close date so when do we anticipate this opportunity being closed whether it be won or lost hopefully it will be one of course but when do you anticipate it being finalized so maybe we could say the end of march for example so thursday the 31st is this is always going to be a rough estimate and you can always change this date as and when but it's just useful to track that anyway and then we've got type so is it existing or new business so let's say as we're going straight to the opportunities area this is existing business and then we've got the stage field and this falls straight into our sales process now do bear in mind this may be very different for you as your business may have customized sales force to meet this precise sales process that your business follows and no two businesses are ever going to be the same so just ensure that you are starting on the main stage or the first stage of that sales process then you've got any campaign source so if this has got any relation to a campaign then you can associate the opportunity with the campaign if you'd like and you can confirm the budget by just ticking the box discovery completed and roi analysis these are all different stages and you may not be at any of these yet so it's entirely up to you if you do or do not want to tick those and then we can select the amount so let's say we know that our example product is ten 000 then we just put that information in and that should give us an estimate on the value of that opportunity and of course that could fluctuate but that just gives again a rough guide like the close date you've also got additional information down here that you can add next steps description and a lead source as well so maybe i know that they came from a trade show or google ads for example let's just put that we it's obviously really important to track that information and the more data you do collect so the more useful it's going to be in the long run and maybe over time we come to realize that all the opportunities that come from google ads never actually turn into sales so you could start tracking those patterns or maybe they have a much higher conversion rate than facebook ads or from linkedin ads this is the sort of data that you're going to begin to track okay so we've created our new opportunity which is of course our new sale press the save button and then this will now load up this is where we can track our sale all the way from the very beginning to like i said earlier in this video hopefully at the very end and we can close this sale as one so just before we get into the sales stages i'm just going to talk you through a few bits and bobs down here so we've got closed date and description and we can tick budget confirmed things like that and those will be fields related to different stages as well and then we've got activity so we can log a phone call a new task a new event and if you've got your email connected you can log emails as well associated with this particular opportunity so maybe you've got an event or you need to create a task to ensure that you do something for that opportunity you can very very easily do that and then moving on from the activities area we've got chatter so this is kind of like an internal how you i could describe it as maybe like a slack channel and you just post information about this particular um opportunity and other people that look at the opportunity can see that information and post on it and share and you can kind of interact with one another and converse make conversation relating to that opportunity so that's very useful and then finally we've got details and this is the key information that you entered at the start of the opportunity or when you were creating the opportunity this is obviously the information that you're going to want to be tracking and if you need to find any of it it will be in the details area so now you're familiar with the basics of opportunities hopefully you know what all of that looks like anyway you're familiar with salesforce now let's go ahead and start managing our sale so we start on a stage one and it's qualification now like i said this is going to vary for any business and each stage is going to be different so take this as a very general explanation but we start on the first stage and then we're going to want to move to stage two provided things are heading in the right direction so once you move from one stage to another you just need to mark its current stage and then you can go away you can come back a week later and maybe update after the analysis has been completed or whatever that particular stage may be for your business and then again you'll come back again and then you'd submit the proposal as this is the stage for our process here and then you just mark that stage as completed and hopefully you continue to move through so you send over their proposal and then they might negotiate a little bit and say oh well we don't want to pay ten thousand let's pay nine thousand and then that negotiation will ensue hopefully you'll complete the negotiations successfully or maybe the negotiations are ongoing so you just mark that stage as in or mark that opportunity as in negotiation and then hopefully the negotiations are successful and we can get to the close stage and this is where we are finalizing our sale hopefully it's been won or unfortunately it's been lost and this is where we can select those two options now at any point you can just skip ahead to the closed area so you may be on the needs analysis stage and then you can jump straight to the close one or closed lost often you're probably going to be jumping to the closed lost if you're at the very very beginning stages and otherwise you would walk the sale all the way through the different stages so if you get to needs analysis realize they're not interested you just close lost the opportunity okay but let's say we've got to negotiation they're happy with our negotiations and we go to closed and then what we need to do is press the select closed stage okay so we press that button then we've got option drop down menu here we can select it as close one which is what we want to be doing or close lost if it didn't go our way so we'll select close one in this instance and then once we do that press the save button it's good news we've stayed the stage changed successfully and now that opportunity has been closed as one we get a nice little message here great work you've closed a successful deal we can now go back to our opportunities area and you'll be able to see that that stage has been updated you can see the close date and all the relevant information and of course you're able to manage all of your opportunities from here one additional thing i do want to show you is the kanban view or there are a couple of views that is worth showing you so views just allow you to see the opportunities in a different way so if you go to the table looking view here use the drop down menu we have the kanban view and the split view now i am a massive massive fan of the kanban view this is each of your opportunities and it's really really easy so you can see this is one we've been dealing with you can just drag it and move it to the different stages it makes it so so so much easier to manage all of your opportunities as you can do it all from the same place as a pl as opposed to having to click into each individual record and update the information so it's literally just a case of dragging and dropping one additional cool feature with the kanban view is you can have it on a big tv inside of your sales department as part of the office and you can see the stages moving across especially if you've got lots and lots of deals going at the same time so that's always really really interesting and then the final view i want to show you is the split view and you can see here we'll have all of our opportunities on the left hand side and then we can just click onto them again this just makes it a bit easier to manage as opposed to having to open them up individually and you can move the stages according to the stage that they are at as they move through the sales process so hopefully you are now familiar with opportunities inside of your salesforce system hopefully this video has been of use to you and you can now go ahead and start managing all of your opportunities very very easily hopefully closing them all as one and i will see you in a moment's time hopefully you are now all set to start using the opportunities inside of salesforce managing each of your sales and hopefully winning as many of those sales as possible if you have enjoyed the video or found it at all useful please consider giving it a like possibly even subscribing if you have any further questions at all you are more than welcome to drop a comment below or you can email me as my details are in the description below and i will do my best to answer any questions you do have thank you ever so much for watching and i will hopefully see you shortly in the next video thank you and goodbye