Opportunity Management

Scrutinize the quantity and quality of sales opportunities with pipeline performance management
so you can best evaluate your opportunity conversion rate.

Track, qualify, and distribute leads to the best-qualified salesperson

Monitor the conversion of opportunities into revenue

Identify stalled deals and check for quota attainment

Simulate strategies to push deals through the sales cycle faster

Opportunity Management is a part of Customer Relationship Management, which enables you to

control your sales process. You can also do this in CRM Mobile, Partner Channel Management
and the Interaction Center.
An opportunity is a recognized possibility for an enterprise, for example, for sales of products or
services. An opportunity can, for example, result from a trade fair, a sales deal or a bid invitation.
The Opportunity describes the sales prospects, their requested products and services, the sales
prospects' budget, the potential sales volume and an estimated sales probability. This information
becomes concrete in the course of the sales cycle, and can be displayed and evaluated in the
system.
Opportunity Management provides the framework for presenting sales projects from the very
start, and tracking their progress. In this way, it provides the basis for an analysis and
optimization of your enterprise.
It is particularly recommended that you use Opportunity Management if:

Many sales representatives work for you

Large sales order values are distributed

The sales cycle spans a long time period of time

Opportunity Management allows you to construct a sales methodology to suit your sales
processes. Your sales employees are coached through the steps of an ideal sales process from
identifying the lead to closing the sale. For more information, see the documentation for Sales
Methodology.

You can insert documents into an opportunity, and manage them. For example, product
presentations which you have received for the opportunity, correspondence or material such as
sketches, building plans and so on. You can use integrated Content Management here.
Integration
To process opportunities directly using the sales organization, and for the sales control to work
efficiently, it is important that you also have access to a front end solution for offline business.
SAP offers such a solution with CRM Mobile. An exchange between the two systems takes place
through interfaces.
Opportunity Management works with SAP Business Partner and is integrated into CRM Partner
Processing and CRM Organizational Management.
The following is contained in the CRM documentation:

Business Partners

Organizational Management

Partner Processing

Example
1. A lead has been created by an employee in Marketing, as a result of a campaign, for
example, an e-mail campaign. This lead has been designated as a hot lead by a sales
representative. The lead is forwarded by workflow to the sales employee responsible,
such as the sales representative or sales manager.
2. You receive the lead in your workflow and then check it and accept it. The system creates
an opportunity automatically, and copies the data from the lead according to the copying
control defined in Customizing. This data could include, for example, a description for
the new opportunity and a business partner.
3. You contact the prospect, and enter further data relating to the opportunity, such as the
estimated date of close, expected sales revenue, status, products, and members of the
sales team.
4. The system creates an activity plan according to the Customizing settings, which
proposes specific activities for the different phases of the opportunity. For more
information, see the documentation for Sales Assistant.
You activate the required activities, and add new ones as required. You put together a
specific activity plan for this opportunity.

5. For opportunities which last over a long period of time, you plan the distribution of the
expected sales revenue and order quantities, for the following months or the next quarter.
6. You qualify the opportunity using the Opportunity Assessment, together with the chance
of success calculated by the system resulting from the assessment. Based on this, you
decide whether the project can be continued: Go/No Go Decision.
7. You work with other elements of the Sales Methodology, such as the Buying Center,
Project Goals and Competitor Information.
8. You present the solution to the sales prospect, and create a quotation.
9. After successful sales negotiations, you create an order.
10. You set the status of the opportunity to won.
11. For the analysis of the completed sales projects, you can carry out an assessment based
on won or lost opportunities in SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence.
Opportunity Assessment/Questionnaire

You can assign several questionnaires to an opportunity that can be found according to different
criteria (status, priority, phase, opportunity group, origin, sales organization, distribution channel,
division). You make settings for determination and criteria for determination in Customizing.
You can use questionnaires in opportunities, for example, for project qualification, or to analyze
won or lost opportunities.
You can use questionnaires within the framework of sales methodology for opportunity
assessment. This kind of assessment can be used for project qualification. Project qualification is
used primarily to assess the costs and values of a project. Before considerable resources are
invested in a sales project, it is necessary to assess whether the expected sales revenue and
chance of success balance against the necessary investment. Through Customizing, you can
define a threshold value for expected sales volume or expected total value. When this value is
exceeded, an assessment is automatically triggered enabling prompt qualification of an
opportunity.
You should decide with your sales team which questions must be answered for the opportunity to
be correctly qualified.
Asking these questions early in the sale helps you to identify risks and to define corrective
actions before embarking on an expensive sales project.

Chance of success calculated by the system

You can use one questionnaire to determine the chances of success as calculated by the system.
Based on the weighting of the questions and answers, the system calculates the chances of
success. The sales employee can use this information as help to take a decision.
You can specify various questions for each answer when defining the questionnaire in
Customizing. You can also specify the same answers for all the questions.
The questions must be weighted for the chance of success calculated by the system. Enter a
weighting factor for each question (for example, 1 equals normal weighting, 2 equals very
important, high weighting).
Specify a number of points for each answer: for example, yes equals 3 points, no equals 0 points.
The system then calculates for each question: weighting factor x points. The result is calculated
for all the questions, and is then compared with the ideal result to be reached. The sales
employee then receives the following message in the opportunity assessment: 225 points were
reached from a maximum of 250 possible points. This corresponds to 90 percent. That means
that in this case the chance of success is 90 percent. This data is displayed as Calculated Chance
in the Opportunity Details
Prerequisites

The questionnaire is implemented with the CRM Survey Tool. You define questions, their
answers and weighting in Customizing. Further information on the CRM Survey Tool is
available under Survey Tool.
Make the settings for the questionnaire in Customizing under Customer Relationship
Management Transactions Settings for Opportunities Sales Methodology Questionnaire for
Opportunities Define Questionnaire.
You also make settings for questionnaire determination in Customizing under:

Customer Relationship Management Transactions Settings for Opportunities Sales

Methodology Questionnaire for Opportunities Define Determination for Questionnaires
.

Customer Relationship Management Transactions Settings for Opportunities Sales

Methodology Questionnaire for Opportunities Define Determination Criteria for
Questionnaires .

Caution
You can only use one questionnaire when the system calculates the chance of success. You must
not only define the determination in Customizing, but you must also assign it to the required
transaction type in Customizing.
Example

The following graphic shows an example of a questionnaire:

An introduction about IPC

SAP CRM uses IPC to determine pricing information when creating a business transaction, such
as a quotation, sales order, service process or a contract. For example, the system automatically
determines the gross price and the discounts and surcharges that are relevant for a specific
customer or for a particular date, in accordance with the valid conditions.
From a technical point of view, pricing in CRM still use condition technique to perform pricing.
Here you can find a link about condition technique and the process when determining the price.
Reference
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm60/helpdata/en/51/0302403d62c442e10000000a1550b0/framese
t.htm
If your company has already got ERP system online, you can direct download the configuration
data to the CRM system using CRM middleware. The configuration data contains pricing
procedure, condition type, access sequence. The condition master data can also be downloaded to
the CRM side. If your company uses the standalone CRM system, the consultant will need to
configure everything in CRM directly.

IPC(Internet Pricing and Configurator) is the core part of pricing. The IPC ensures integrated
price calculation, regardless of whether prices are calculated for a business transaction in CRM
Enterprise, in Telesales, or in SAP E-Commerce. I will post a new blog to make an brief
introduction to IPC.
The CRM applications communicate with IPC using pricing communication structure. Usually,
the standard structure field does not meet the requirement. We need to add custom field during
pricing process. For example, we need to determine price according to product hierarchy which
is not contained in the custom communication structure. In this case, we need to do some
enhancement to pass custom field to the communication structure. SAP provide an BADI
named CRM_COND_COM_BADI for this purpose. I will also post a new article to cover this
requirement.

SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (SAP IPC) is used in numerous SAP applications to
configure products through the Internet. SAP IPC belongs, technically speaking, to SAP
Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM), but it can also be installed separately on its
own database (standalone).
As of SAP CRM 5.0 the SAP IPC 7.0 is a component of the Application Platform (AP).
Compared to the previous release that is SAP IPC 4.0, the technology has been switched to SAP
Virtual Machine Container (VMC), which is part of the SAP Web Application Server (SAP Web
AS) and SAP NetWeaver 2004s. Installation of a separate database is not required as SAP IPC
7.0 is moved to the SAP Web AS. This was done in order to use VMC.
IPC supports the same functionality like R/3 pricing and VC(variant configuration) and it is the
first Java applicaiton that runs in the VMC(virtual machine container). It comprises below parts:

SCE Sales Configuration Engine

SPE Sales Pricing Engine
PME Product modeling Environment
IPC also contains an JSP application that is integrated into ERP ECO and CRM web channel.
Use this JSP application, internet customer can easy configure an configurable material in the
browser.
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm60/helpdata/en/51/0302403d62c442e10000000a1550b0/framese
t.htm
Whats Internet Pricing and Configurator
IPC is a SAP CRM concept used to fetch all Pricing information when a customer is creating a
sales order ,a quotation or a contract.
The configuartor part of IPC is used to help the customers decide the various characterstics of
the product they order when they create an order, quotation or an contract.(Its the CRM version

of Variant Configuration in SAP R/3).

To understand the pricing we should first know where IPC is placed in SAP CRM 5.0 and SAP
CRM 2007.

Starting from CRM 5.0 to CRM 2007 , SAP has introduced the concept of VMC.VMC is the
virtual machine part of SAP kernel AS ABAP, provides a run time environment to execute java
code. IPC is no longer a standalone server which it was in CRM 4.0 and previous versions, it is
now a part of SAP kernel AS ABAP.

The advantage is that now each user is given a new VMC session and when a VMC is down , it
only effects a single user not all users.

The VMC is contained within the SAP kernel AS ABAP, and so it does not have to be installed
separately. Though it does have to be activated by changing a few profile parameters. Note
854170 describes how to do this.

http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/CRM/Marketing