Lead and Opportunity Management

Create visibility through your entire sales process

Managing leads and opportunities is one of the primary reasons to use a CRM. Companies track every single interaction with business leads and create accountability around driving those leads through the opportunity management process to a successful sale. 

Lead management is a crucial process for businesses to convert potential customers (leads) into paying customers. High-performing companies have a systematic process to capture, track, qualify, and nurture potential customers (leads). The goal of these actions is to convert these leads into customers and build lasting relationships with them; meaning that most companies would like to develop strong relationships with customers that lead to repeat sales. Lead management involves a combination of marketing and sales efforts and relies on technology, particularly CRM and marketing automation, to streamline and optimize the process. 

Once a lead has been qualified, it becomes a sales opportunity. Opportunity management is the process of tracking, managing, and nurturing potential sales opportunities to close. It involves systematically organizing and analyzing information about potential deals, prospects, and sales activities to maximize the chances of closing deals successfully. By effectively managing opportunities through a CRM, sales teams can enhance their efficiency, improve collaboration, and increase the likelihood of converting leads into satisfied, repeat customers. It provides a structured approach to sales, helping organizations prioritize efforts and allocate resources effectively.

Lead and opportunity management are available on all Insightly plans. 

Key stages of the lead management process

Effective lead management is crucial for maximizing the return on marketing investment, improving sales efficiency, and delivering a better experience to potential customers. By leveraging CRM and marketing SaaS solutions, organizations can automate and optimize their lead management processes, resulting in a more organized and effective approach to customer acquisition and retention.

Lead generation

Identify and attract potential leads through your website, organic and paid social, events, content marketing, public relations, and advertising.

Lead capture

CRM and marketing SaaS tools help capture leads from various sources such as website forms, social media, email campaigns, events, and other marketing channels.

Information collected may include contact details, demographics, and interactions with marketing content.

Lead qualification

Evaluate and score leads based on criteria that matter to your business. Examples might be budget, company size, number of users, projected deal size, number of decision-makers, integration requirements, current CRM in use (if any), and timeline for a decision. Marketing automation platforms use lead scoring models to assign numerical values to leads, reflecting their potential interest and readiness to buy.

Lead segmentation

Leads are segmented based on common characteristics or behaviors. This allows for more targeted and personalized marketing and sales strategies. Segmentation can be based on factors like industry, company size, geographic location, or specific interactions with marketing content.

Lead nurturing

Nurturing involves engaging and building relationships with leads over time through exposure to relevant and personalized content. This is typically done with a Marketing application through automated drip email campaigns, educational content, and targeted campaigns. Marketing automation tools enable marketers to schedule and automate the delivery of content based on lead behavior and predefined triggers.

Lead distribution

In a sales environment, once leads are qualified, they are often distributed to the appropriate sales representatives or teams for follow-up. CRM systems facilitate the assignment of leads to sales reps based on predefined rules and automation or manually by sales managers.

Lead conversion

The ultimate goal of lead management is to convert leads into customers. This involves a smooth handover from marketing to sales, effective communication, and the ability to track and measure conversion rates.

Key Stages of the Opportunity Management Process

Opportunity management is essential for sales success because it is a forcing function for sales leadership and teams to focus on the right prospects, understand lead quality, allocate resources efficiently, make informed decisions, build stronger relationships with customers, and continuously improve their sales processes.

By evaluating and qualifying opportunities, sales professionals can concentrate their efforts on prospects that are more likely to convert into customers, maximizing their efficiency and resources and winning more successful deals.

Understanding the Opportunity Record

Opportunities include unique fields that empower sales teams and leadership to better understand each potential deal. 

• Summary Bar – The summary bar gives you a quick glance at the most important details found in the record.
• Pipeline – pipelines can be set up by an administrator to guide your salespeople through an established process. Completed stages are in green, the current stage is blue, and upcoming stages are in gray.
• Converted from Lead – If the opportunity was created from a lead, we’ll display this field and add a hyperlink to the original lead record.
• Current State & Reason – Keep track of an opportunity by setting its current state to Open, Suspended, Abandoned, Lost, or Won. Open and Suspended are considered “open” states, and the others “closed” states, meaning their work is complete. Your administrator can also create state reasons indicating why the state was changed.
• Probability of Winning – The likelihood that the deal will be won. You will change this value higher or lower as the negotiations progress.
• Forecast Close Date – An estimated date that you expect the deal will close by.
• Linked Email Address – A version of your Insightly mailbox address that will link any saved emails to this opportunity, as well as senders and recipients. This helps you track correspondence to maintain a complete history of the deal.
• Value – Because opportunities are tied to deals, they have a numerical currency value. The total value is displayed at the top of any list of opportunities and can also be included in reports. When you create or edit a record, you can define this potential value either as a fixed bid or lump sum, per hour, per week, or per month.

Creating Opportunities

Opportunities can be automatically created through a standard sales process when converting a qualified lead, or they can be set up manually with links to their related contacts and organizations. Links are important for indicating who is involved with the opportunity and what their role is Open opportunities appear as an Insight card on any linked Contacts, Leads, and Organizations so that you can easily determine the relationships between opportunities and the people and companies that are involved in the sales process. 

Pipeline Management

Opportunities are typically visualized and managed through a sales pipeline within Insightly. The pipeline represents the stages a deal goes through from initial contact to closure. Sales professionals move opportunities through the pipeline by completing specific actions and meeting predefined criteria for each stage. In Insightly, completed stages are in green, the current stage is blue, and upcoming stages are in gray.

You can tie activity sets to a Pipeline to automatically create tasks and events when a stage is reached.

Closing an Opportunity and Converting to a Project

Once you’ve closed a deal, you can create a project right from an opportunity to manage the work you’ll do for a new customer or client. When you convert an opportunity to a project:

• • A new project will be created
  • The opportunity status will change to “won”
  • The opportunity will be conveniently linked to the new project so you have all relevant details in one place
  • You will have the option to link the opportunity’s emails and notes to the project and copy its files
  • Any links associated with the opportunity will also be linked to the new project