Opportunity

[#1]

We work on projects where our products are specified by architects and when working on projects where there are 5+ more contractors tendering for a specific project, we need to run opportunities like a contact, so there is 1 opportunity even though  5 or more quotes have been sent to different companies. If we create a new opportunity for each contractor/ contact, it would give a false impression of projected sales. Any ideas?

[#2]

I have come across this one myself on more than one occasion. It would be really useful if you could create, say, five opportunities, all bidding for the same business, but get the forecasting to report only one figure. One question to answer is if there's only one "real" opportunity that we've bid for five times, what figure do you report in the forecast? The average of the five opportunities? The lowest? The highest? Perhaps we need some options. Jeff

Message Edited by Jeff_Granger on 12-06-2009 06:59 PM

[#3]

Maybe assign a probability of one fifth of the total to each.... or add each of the contacts to the one opportunity?

i also get in situations (have one this week) where a user approached 4 resellers for a project, each who asked me to quote to do the work. I estimated the liklihood of the project at 60% and assigned a probability of 15% to each.... and will adjust them based on feedback till (hopefully) one gets "Closed-Won" and the others Lost

The problem with these is that there can be so many different scenarios requiring different solutions, which makes it very hard to add as in code. while it may be possible to write code to handle one solution, others would want it done differently.

If you always treat these in a similar way and it's really important, you might get an ACT! SDK developer to create a solution for you... custom reports and a plugin to detect ops with the same name, products and/or amount and handle them appropriately.

[#4]

It is not just the sales forecast, but the quotes. As we normally send the same prices or least quote for the same products, it would be great just to be able to change the contact name and address on the standard 'opportunity' quote and not have to rewrite the whole quote.Often the contractors ask for a price for the ' .......' project and expect you to know what they need.

I am pretty new to Act!, so I need help. How do you think I should run this scenario?

 I work with an architect on a project called ' Act HQ building', I correspond with him and exchange drawings, email etc in view of getting our products specified. I might add engineers and landscape architects too, to the project. When it comes to project being sent out for tender, we have 5 or more contractors contacting us for prices, this is recorded under each contact. When the contract is won by a company we then agree on final price and delivery etc. 

[#5]

harding, if using the Quote Template from the opportunity, wouldn't that create the same document?

[#6]

I was more thinking that it would be easier if the quote was already written with the list of products and the quantity, so others in our company don't waste time looking at drawings and calculating a price for 5 different companies. To write a quote can take 30 min,so we could save at least 2 hours.  

[#7]

Harding,

Maybe what you need is the ability to copy the opportunity to multiple contacts? Can be done with:

http://www.tnhg.com/prod/download/CopyOpportunityToLookup.html

[#8]

thanks, I'll try that

[#9]

I think there are a couple of ways you could manage this in opportunities

a) Create a seperate process for the Companies you are quoting to so you can then simply report the pipeline based on each organisation you are quote particular jobs with rather than all processes

b) Create a process for where the contact requesting the quote is not the first one to ask you so the first one in their quote goes in the pipeline and any subsequent quote go in the process additinal quote. Again you can seperate out your reporting by process. You coudl also make the Opportunity name the same so if you want to bring all the opportunities for "New Swimming Pool" or whatever your naming convention for projects is it can be done easily.