Outlook® 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Working with Opportunities

In This Chapter

• Understanding opportunities

• Keeping track of opportunities

• Letting BCM crunch the numbers

• Working with Office Accounting

• Viewing your opportunities

In this chapter, we lead you through the entire sales process using BCM. We show you how to create an initial opportunity, make changes to it as the sale makes its way through the sales funnel, and view your opportunities by using the dashboards. For good measure, we even show you how to link your BCM opportunities with your Office Accounting opportunities — unless, of course, you would rather duplicate your efforts.

Taking Advantage of Opportunities

In BCM, an opportunity is a potential sale to a business contact or account, and each opportunity must be associated with either a business contact or account. When you create an opportunity, you actually create a brand-new item in much the same way that you create a new business contact or account. You can include the names of your products or services, specify a sales stage and forecasted close date, and even add a bunch of your own user-defined fields. If you prefer, you can create a new opportunity directly from a business contact or account record.

After creating an opportunity, you can go to the Opportunities folder in the Folder List, where you can see all your opportunities listed together. Or you can view the business contact's or account's Communication History tab. As if that isn't enough, you can choose from a slew of opportunities ...