Understanding Leads & Opportunities

Updated4 January 2023

Terms

Existing Customers please note:

The term Accounts has been renamed to Organisations
The term Contacts has been renamed to People

Organisations

An Organisation record typically holds all information specific to an Organisation entity. An Organisation maybe a Business Client, Business Prospect (Potential Client), a Referrer Organisation or a Supplier. Personal Clients would not exist in the organisations module.

Examples might be:

A Business’ Clients (sync’d from CCH Central, Iris or StarPM)
Professional Firm (Introducer such as ‘Barclays Bank plc’)
Prospect Organisation (A potential new client organisation)

People

A Person record is an individual who is either a person not associated with an organisation (e.g. personal tax client) or could be a person associated with an organisation (e.g. A person who works at the Business Client, Business Prospect or Referrer Organisation).

For example, if Techco is the Organisation, then John Smith, Sales Manager of Techco is the Person. The People module holds all information relating to these individuals and provides a vantage point for any history relating to a person record, for example if they were involved in a meeting, raised a case or sent an email.

Examples might be:

A Personal Client (sync’d from CCH Central, Iris or StarPM)
People Involved with a Business Client (contacts in CCH Central or added into CRM)
People Involved with a Professional Firm
People Involved with a Prospect Organisation

Many people can be related to one or more Organisations.

A client list will therefore include CRM records from BOTH the Organisations and People modules (e.g. Business Clients + Personal Clients).

Opportunities

In CRM an Opportunity is a record containing qualified sales metrics relating to one or more products or services offered by your practice.

For instance, there may be an opportunity to sell Payroll services to Bloggs & Co. In this example, the Opportunity is for payroll and you may wish to track the lead source of the opportunity, the potential value and sales stage. An Opportunity is created and linked to an Organisation or Person when you have established buying power and have entered the buying cycle.

Leads

In CRM a Lead is an unqualified person, usually generated from some form of marketing related event, for example it could be someone that you met at a trade show or a person that has filled out a form on your website, and you are not sure yet if they have authority to buy products or services. These enquiries are for the business development staff to either qualify-in or qualify-out.

Note: Leads are kept separate to the Organisations, People, and Opportunities modules so that your data is kept clean and relevant.

Once a Lead is qualified-in, the conversion process will create the following records:

a New Person (or if a duplicate exists, link to the existing person)
a New Organisation (or if a duplicate exists, link to the existing organisation)
a New Opportunity (optionally)
Optionally Allow You to Create a Meeting, Task or Phone Call for the Converted Person

It is possible to, and more than likely that, a person will be added multiple times as a Lead over a period of time; one per enquiry. Each Lead refers to the product/service they are enquiring about and someone can make multiple enquiries over time. The person who is being entered as a lead could also co-exist as a Person.

Let us suppose marketing place an advert in Accountancy Age and two enquiries are received for a new service you are offering…

Bob X (unknown to CRM)
Bob Smith (A loyal customer for years and already in your CRM as a Person)

How are these leads recorded in CRM?

Marketing will want to report on the number of new leads entered.
Sales will need to follow up all Leads.
The practice will want to keep a record of all enquiries from a person or marketing campaign over time.

At this stage you might ask why not just create a new opportunity for each enquiry?

Reasons why not:

Early on, a Lead is sometimes just a person’s name and it would be overkill and somewhat clunky to have to add them as a person (possibly add their business) and then add an opportunity.
Inbound enquiries can come from all sorts of places. For example, someone completes a form on your website signing up to your ‘Fee Protection Newsletter’. The name and address need to be added in CRM. They may already exist as a client in CRM from some other opportunity however the anonymous sign-up on the website is not easily identified as a known person in CRM. And even if it were, how would the new enquiry be identified?
There should only exist one unique Organisation, Person and Opportunity however there can be many duplicate Leads. For example, you might show interest in Fee Protection in January and again from another campaign in July. Two leads (possibly with differing status’ such as ‘Did not Proceed’ and/or ‘Active’)

Summary Visualisation

The following graphic shows how records relate to one another. In addition to the above there are other modules related to records. For example, activity related modules such as Tasks in progress with a Lead or Person, emails sent/received, or meetings scheduled etc.

Lead Process

The Leads module should never contain hundreds of old names and addresses or contain a list of email addresses sourced from a data provider.

A list of Leads should be small and consist of new enquiries that need to be qualified in or out (marked at ‘dead’ or ‘converted’).

The conversion process copies the Lead details and creates an Organisation. Person and Opportunities (Opportunity). It doesn’t matter if someone exists more than once in the Leads module. During the conversion process the CRM will check for the existence of that Person/ Organisation. If it finds a match the CRM won’t create a duplicate. The CRM will link the Lead/enquiry to the match found.

From an Opportunity you can print or email Quotes/Proposals. These are PDF files containing merge fields gathered from the Opportunity record and includes header and footer information. PDF Templates can be created in the PDF Template library. Different templates can be used depending on the practice’s requirements.

Lead to Opportunity Process

Opportunity Module

The Opportunity Module in CRM allows a user to track individual or organisational sales from start to finish. Each record represents a prospective proposal and includes relevant sale data, as well as relating to other important records such as a Person and/or Organisation, etc.

An opportunity can typically progress through several Sales Stages from prospecting until it is marked either Closed Won or Closed Lost.

Reporting can utilise the Opportunities sales data for forecasting; to understand and predict sales trends as well as focus work to achieve sales quotas. In addition, this information can be displayed on a dashlet allowing a user to consistently see an overview of assigned opportunities and a snapshot of current progress in real-time.

The Opportunity module also provides data and information to carry out win/loss analysis; providing an potential understanding to the Organisation why business is lost, and this can contribute to the growth of the practice by using the information from the loss analysis to influence marketing through to development and improvement to sales cycles and ultimately opportunity wins.

Functionality in the Opportunity Module

The Opportunities Module displays all Opportunities and the details recorded for each single opportunity, including its fields, sub-panels of related records, and activity stream.

Function	Description
Create Opportunity	Opens the record view layout to create a new opportunity
View Opportunity	Opens the list view layout to search and display opportunities
Edit Opportunity	Edit existing opportunities
Delete	Delete one or more opportunities at a time
Print to PDF	Create a PDF designed from one of your PDF Templates containing information from the Opportunity
Email PDF	Create an email designed from one of your email templates containing an attached PDF (from PDF Templates)
Email Quotation	Create an email designed from one of your email templates containing the Opportunity data within the body of the Email
Create LoE	Create a Letter of Engagement from one of your LoE Templates containing the legal narrative for each of the products and services specified within the Opportunity
Create Deferred Opportunity	Create a duplicate of the current Opportunity but only copy Line Items at Status = ‘Deferred’
Duplicate	Create a duplicate of the currently viewed Opportunity
View Change Log	Allows user to view a history of changes to the record
Convert to Invoice	Converts an opportunity to an invoice
Create Deferred Opportunity	Create a deferred opportunity

Automated Behaviour

Some automation is built into CRM to help reduce the amount of manual data entry as well as help to keep the data clean and up to date. For example, if you were to mark an Opportunity as Closed Lost then the CRM should prompt the user to enter a reason for the loss.

The following lists the automation rules and their behaviour:

Automation Rule	Behaviour
Sales Stage set to Closed Won	Sets Probability to 100% Sets all ‘Active’ Line Items to ‘Won’
Sales Stage set to Closed Lost	Sets Probability to 0% Sets all ‘Active’ Line Items to ‘Lost’
Create Deferred Opportunity	Creates a new Opportunity containing a copy of those Line Items that have a Status ‘Deferred’ Prompts user to set a Next Action date for the Deferred Opportunity
Opportunity Total and Line Item Group Total	Sum of amounts are calculated from ‘Active’ and ‘Won’ line items only (not Lost or Deferred)
Lost Total Calculation	Sum of Line Items where status = ‘Lost’

Appendix A - Opportunity Module Fields:

Opportunity Fields

Not all fields are visible. Items in italics are not available by default.

Field	Description	Format
assigned_to	Assigned User	Relate
billing_account	Organisation	Relate
billing_contact	Person	Relate
currency_id	Currency	Id
lead_source_c	Lead Source	Dropdown
date_entered	Date Created	Datetime
date_modified	Date Modified	Datetime
description	Misc. Notes	Text Area
discount_amount	Discount	Currency
referred_by_account_c	Referred by Organisation	Relate
referred_by_contact_c	Referred by Person	Relate
lost_reason_c	Lost Reason	Dropdown
lost_reason_detail_c	Lost Reason Detail	Text
name	Title	Name
number	Num	Integer
date_closed_c	Close Date	Date
opportunity	Assignment	Relate
stage	Sales Stage	Drop Down
subtotal_amount	Total Net	Currency
subtotal_tax_amount	Subtotal + Tax	Currency
tax_amount	Tax	Currency
total_amount	Grand Total	Currency
total_amt	Total Gross	Currency
warmth_indicator_c	Warmth Indicator	Dropdown
next_action_date_c	Next Action Date	Date
nxt_action_c	Next Action Subject	Text
last_action_subject_c	Last Action Subject	Text
last_action_date_C	Last Action Date	Date

Opportunity Line Item Fields

Each Opportunity can have many Line Items. A Line Item is a product or service you supply. For example, “Bookkeeping”. Fields that exist at Line Item level are listed below.

DB Field Name	Field Label (Visible)	Format
part_number	Code	Text field
name	Product	Text Area
fi_item_sales_stage	Item Sales Stage	Drop down
fi_recurrence	Recurrence	Drop down
product_list_price	List	Currency
product_qty	Quantity	Decimal
product_total_price	Total	Currency

Additionally, Line Items can be organised into ‘Groups’. The following Groups are created automatically.

Group Name
One-Off Items
Recurring Items

Note: These two options are created by default when you create a new Opportunity. You can add more Groups and you can remove a Group.

Sales Stages

A Sales Stage identifies the current stage (e.g. Meeting, Proposition etc.) that the Opportunity is in during the sales cycle.

When the user selects a sales stage in the opportunity record, they can manually set the probability of success: 0, 10, 25, 50, 75, 90, 100 % in the Probability (%) field. These probability values are useful as it helps to calculate and predict the sales forecast for a specified time period.

Sales Stage	Suggested Definition
Prospect	Early stage of the opportunity and starting point once an Opportunity has been identified.
Meeting	Meeting with the prospect to determine if a sales opportunity exists and to build the relationship.
Proposition	Delivering the proposition, sometimes called the price quote, to the prospect.
Closing	In the advanced stages of the sale and looking to close the opportunity
Closed Won	The prospect has agreed to proceed, and the onboarding stage begins.
Closed Lost	The prospect has decided not to go ahead or has chosen a different supplier.
Pending	The prospect isn’t going ahead now but there is still an opportunity. No decision one way or another but it’s not dead or its not yet a priority for the prospect. To keep in touch.