On D-Tools Cloud, you initiate the workflow for a project or service contract by creating an "Opportunity." An Opportunity is how you add a qualified sales lead to Cloud, create a quote for equipment and labor, and approach the customer with a proposal.
When you create an opportunity, you can add the customer's contact details, site details, and the estimated budget for the requirement. Cloud also allows you to classify opportunities by market, sales lead, and project type (Retrofit, Remodel, Reconstruction) to derive rich insights from the Cloud Analytics engine and track your sales pipeline.
Types of opportunities
Cloud allows the creation of two types of opportunities:
Project opportunity
A project opportunity is comprehensive, allowing you to add products, labor to install and program products, labor for other activities, and service plans to maintain the products.
When you mark the project opportunity as "Won," Cloud creates a project.
Service opportunity
A service opportunity is intended for use when you want to propose service plans as an afterthought for projects that are already complete or in progress. Cloud also lets you use service opportunities to provide services without a project associated with them.
When a service opportunity is "Won," Cloud creates a service contract.
Opportunity stages
You will need a way to track the progress of the opportunities during your sales meetings. On Cloud, you can do this using "Opportunity Stages." An opportunity stage indicates a certain level of progress on the opportunity.
As your salespeople work on opportunities, they can move them through different stages based on progress.
For example, a typical set of opportunity stages could be: New Lead > Site Visit Completed > Quoting > Negotiating > Signed Proposal.
Cloud provides some default opportunity stages. You can customize them as needed.
Learn more about customizing the opportunity stages.
Here is a screenshot with 7 opportunity stages and 3 stage groups.
Opportunity stages let you continuously monitor the sales pipeline from the Cloud Dashboard and the Sales reports available on Cloud.
Work on opportunities
Once you create an opportunity, it includes all necessary details, including the account, work site, and scope of the resulting project. You can always change or update them in the Opportunity Details view.
You can switch between the Kanban view and List view to get a full view of all opportunities in your Cloud account.
Here is a screenshot of the opportunities in the List view.
To work on opportunities and win them quickly, you have options to:
Assign opportunities to different team members and let them work on quoting and proposal creation.
Share the opportunity with multiple team members so they can collaborate and delegate tasks using notes, to-dos, and real-time Chat.
For effective management of opportunities within your team, you have options to:
Restrict your Salespeople from viewing others' opportunities by assigning them the "View Opportunities > Mine" permission.
Eventually, when you have added a lot of opportunities and are trying to find a specific opportunity, you can do the following to find it:
Search by opportunity name or quote number.
Sort by opportunity name, account name, priority, and a few more parameters.
Filter by opportunity type, stage, building type, market sector, project type, priority, fulfillment location, quote state, and proposal state. For the proposal state, the "expiring soon" indicator indicates that the proposal's end date is within 7 days.
Filter by created, estimated close, actual close, and next-to-do dates. These filters can filter opportunities by month, quarter, year, or a custom date range.
Filter by salesperson and engineer assigned to the opportunity.
Some filter values come from the opportunity details, and others come from Settings.
Mark the opportunity as Won
Cloud has a distinct stage, "Won," that lets you notify users in your account that the customer has accepted the proposal. Once you mark an opportunity as Won, Cloud will prompt you to do one of the following:
Create a project for a project opportunity.
Create a service contract for a service opportunity.
Here is a screenshot of the pop-up that appears when you mark a project opportunity as Won.
Learn more about marking an opportunity as won.
If the customer declines the proposal, you can mark the opportunity as "Lost" with an appropriate reason. Cloud will collect the 'Lost Reason' data for opportunities and provide insights to help you improve the closing ratio.
Learn more about capturing and analyzing lost opportunities.
Opportunity defaults
Before adding opportunities to Cloud, check our defaults for managing opportunities. These defaults are located under "Settings > Opportunity."
You can update them if they don't suit your needs. This way, you can start tracking the right sales metrics from the start.