An Opportunity represents a qualified contact or company that you may do business with. They’ve spoken to your sales team, expressed interest in continuing the conversation, and maybe even agreed to hear a sales pitch or look over a proposal.
Opportunities often start as Leads, but have passed your internal qualification process and have graduated into a legitimate opportunity to make a sale or close a deal.
You can access your Opportunities and Pipelines by clicking the Opportunities icon
in the left panel.
In this article we'll look at Opportunities in detail, and cover the following topics:
What are Opportunities
An opportunity is any kind of business development effort you’d like to track. It can be a service, or a physical good. Generally, it is the opportunity you have to bring in revenue to your business.
Each opportunity is moved through a series of business stages that you can create yourself to match the defined sales process of your business. These business stages are collectively called a Pipeline.
As you go through your sales or project process, you will move your opportunities through each stage of your pipeline, until you reach the end of the business stages and the opportunity is marked won, lost, or abandoned.
Copper allows you to create your own customized process and visually move your opportunities through each stage, allowing you to see how much is in the pipeline and take action accordingly.
Why should I use Opportunities?
Organization -- Opportunities creates consistent processes, leverages best practices from your top performers, and is a great visual representation of this aspect of your business.
Transparency -- The Opportunities section acts as a single source of truth to identify bottlenecks and low performers within your team; it ensures everyone is on the same page and accountable to each other.
Reporting -- Tracking and storing data is integral to forecasting revenue and managing performance of your team as you grow.
Knowing Next Steps -- Using pipelines to track deals helps you to identify where in the process your revenue is sitting which in turn helps you to understand what needs to be done to keep up momentum.
How should I use Opportunities?
The way you use the Opportunities section will be highly dependent on the nature of your business.
You should use your opportunities to help you keep track of important information regarding your potential deals.
What is the business deal you hope to close? Is it placing a job-seeker in a position? Soliciting a donation? Making a sale? Write down your answer to this question before you set out to create opportunities.
An opportunity can represent the sale of a product, billing associated with services, or even an activity with no direct monetary value like increasing your press coverage.
Your process could be simple, having only 3 stages of pipeline from Identified to Closed, or it could be complex where it moves to a different pipeline once you close the first pipeline.
Tips for using Opportunities
Always store your important data, such as:
Projected Close Date
Projected Revenue
Primary Contact/Decision Maker
Relevant Files -- these can be stored directly on the Opportunity, Google Drive, or Dropbox.
Make use of the create custom fields to tailor your opportunity to your business needs. You can use drop-down boxes to set up fields such as:
Product Selections
Renewal Dates
Additional Monetary Values (ARR vs MRR)
Set tasks for the next steps that you need to do to progress through the stages of your opportunity. Your tasks can also be related to other records.
Customize Opportunities
Your pipeline can be customized with a variety of options. These include things like the ability to Edit Opportunity Cards and define Slipping Deals and Top Deals.
You can Edit Opportunity Cards to customize the look of the opportunities that display on your pipeline by choosing which pieces of information are displayed, and in what order.
To customize opportunity cards, click the settings icon in the upper right corner of your pipeline and select “Opportunity Card Fields”
Click each drop down and choose which data fields display on your opportunities.
Click save when you're finished. Please note that the opportunity title will always be displayed first.
You can also customize the Sales View Settings and set a threshold on your opportunities so that they visually notify you when an opportunity is considered a Slipping Deal or Top Deal.
Sales View Settings allows you to set parameters for visual cues that let you easily assess when an opportunity has crossed a threshold of inactive days (slipping opportunities) or is above a certain value (top opportunities).
This view will be unique to the user who has set them and the threshold can vary from user to user, depending on how it is set. Feel free to set guidelines for your team as to what constitutes a slipping opportunity or top deal.
Slipping Opportunities
To set your Slipping Opportunities threshold, simply click the eye icon in the upper right of the pipeline you’d like to adjust.
From here, you can set choose the number of inactive days that can pass before Copper notifies you that an opportunity is slipping.
For instance, if you set the threshold to 7 days, your opportunities will turn red on the 8th day of inactivity.
You can also disable this view by checking the box labeled “Disable View”.
Top Opportunities
To set your Top Opportunities threshold, simply click the eye icon in the upper right of the pipeline you’d like to adjust.
From here, you can set the monetary value threshold for opportunities to be designated as “Top”.
For instance, if you’ve set your value threshold as $500, any opportunities with a value of $500 or more display a green dollar sign in the lower right corner of the opportunity tile.
You can also disable this view by checking the box labeled “Disable View”.
You can see an opportunity with both the “Slipping” and “Top Deal” designation below:
Understanding Won, Lost, and Abandoned Statuses
As you move your opportunity through your pipeline, you will reach the end of your process and will mark your opportunity as won, lost, or abandoned.
Won indicates that your opportunity was a success and you were able to complete your opportunity by closing the deal or making the sale. Add a closing date to indicate when you were able to complete your deal.
Lost indicates that the opportunity was not completed and did not move forward. Select a loss reason, and change the close date to today to keep your reporting accurate.
Abandoned indicates that your opportunity is in a limbo state; this is usually because your customer has asked you to put a hold or delay the timeline for the opportunity. You will normally have a related task to follow up with this customer at a later date.
Marking your opportunities with the proper status will make your reporting much more accurate as you’ll be able to filter out abandoned opportunities so they don’t affect your won or lost reports. It will also make your Pipeline more clean and manageable, as you'll only be viewing the deals you're actively working.
Creating an Opportunity
You can create opportunities in one of two ways:
Adding a single opportunity at a time
Importing Opportunities from another source
Each method is accessible by clicking the blue ADD NEW button at the top of the Opportunities section.
Adding a New Opportunity
Click the ADD NEW button. A drop-down menu will appear.
Select Add Opportunity. A new dialog box will appear.
Fill out as much information as you have in the Add a New Opportunity dialog box. The only required fields are the Name and Primary Contact fields, all other blank fields are optional.
Once you’ve finished filling out all the information you’ve gathered, click the Save button in the bottom right corner of the dialog box.
Importing Opportunities
For instructions on importing, please view our documentation on How to Import Data into Copper, How to Import Data from Excel or CSV or How to Import from Google Contacts.
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