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Maximize the potential of every customer relationship with the pursue opportunities process area

  • Article

Applies to: Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

This article provides an overview of pursuing sales opportunities by using Dynamics 365 Sales to nurture and close deals to meet revenue targets. Consistently progressing qualified leads toward won deals is essential for sales success. Dynamics 365 Sales enables data-driven opportunity management to improve forecast accuracy, win rates, and deal velocity.

The opportunity process starts by capturing new potential deals in the pipeline. Details such as products, competitors, and stakeholders help qualify the likelihood of closure. Opportunities are then nurtured through ongoing communication and engagement activities that are tracked in Dynamics 365. Scoring models analyze attributes to prioritize higher-potential deals.

As opportunities proceed toward a sale, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management provides real-time visibility into inventory availability for quoting. Price negotiation and approvals are streamlined. Finalized quotes are converted to orders when deals are won. Loss analysis helps improve the sales process.

Through integrated visibility into the entire opportunity lifecycle, sales teams can optimize deal progress for increased sales performance. Dynamics 365 Sales provides intelligent tools to guide opportunity development based on historical data and emerging trends. Early implementation of robust opportunity management establishes a solid foundation for growth.

Key stakeholders

  • Sales reps: Qualify and progress opportunities.
  • Sales managers: Coach reps and oversee the pipeline.
  • Marketing: Generate qualified leads.
  • Customer Service: Provide product support.
  • Finance: Track opportunity revenue.

Pursue opportunities flow

The following diagram illustrates the pursue opportunities business process area.

Each solid gray rectangle on the diagram represents an end-to-end business process. The solid blue rectangle represents the business process area. The diagram shows the subprocesses for the business process area. The arrows on the diagram show the flow of the business process in an organization. If a subprocess can lead to more than one other subprocess, the parallel subprocesses are shown as branches.

Flow diagram for the pursue opportunities business process area, which is explained in the paragraph after the image.

Influenced by the upstream identify and qualify leads process, this area affects downstream processes such as Estimate and quote sales and Order to cash.

  1. Manage Opportunity Process: Start new potential deals.

    • Add products, competitors, and stakeholders.

  2. Nurture and Manage Opportunities: Develop and oversee existing opportunities.

    • Develop an opportunity nurturing plan.
    • Track engagement activities, and update status.
    • Prioritize opportunities based on the likelihood of closure.

Benefits

There are many benefits that accrue from implementing technology to support the pursue opportunities business process area. This section outlines key benefits that an organization might monitor and measure to track the impact of their pursue opportunities business process.

  • Increased customer lifetime value

    Enhance retention, and expand accounts.

  • Higher profitability

    Up-sell and cross-sell additional products and services.

  • Improved customer experiences

    Personalized sales and service are powered by unified Dynamics 365 data.

  • Better account collaboration

    Customer insights are shared across teams.

  • Proactive issue resolution

    Identify potential problems early to prevent churn.

Overall, Dynamics 365 enables organizations to maximize the potential of every customer relationship.

Next steps

If you want to implement Dynamics 365 solutions to help with your business processes for pursuing opportunities, use the following resources and steps to learn more.

  1. Define sales strategies

  2. Run marketing campaigns

  3. Identify and qualify leads

  4. Pursue opportunities (the article that you're currently reading)

  5. Estimate and quote sales

  6. Manage customer relationships

Contributors

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