Opportunities- How to complete?

Hi My name is Melinda. I am happy to be a part of infusion-soft. Great program.
I am curious how an opportunity is completed. When I select won or lost nothing changes. There is still a next action and the opportunity still shows up in my opportunity list. Is there a procedure I am missing?

Hi @Melinda_Manley,

By design, opportunities, “out of the box” in Infusionsoft, do not move from stage to stage (including wins) on their own or ‘automatically’. You must go into the contact’s opportunity records and manually tell it that it has moved a stage. There are programmatic ways to manage this automatically but it isn’t available to behave that way natively.

Thank you, John. I understand that opportunities are a manual process. I am a little confused I guess. Here are two questions about Opportunities.

  1. Once an opportunity has purchased from you, my thinking is that opportunity is closed -“Won”. If I want to go back to him and sell him more would I create another opportunity?
    So to continue this, If he did not buy, I would mark the opportunity as lost. He is interested in looking at my product again in 6 months. I am thinking that in 6 months when I start the conversation again, I will create another opportunity.
    Is that how you would use the opportunity feature?

Hi @Melinda_Manley,

So yes, that is how, out of the box, it would work. The case of a client having more than one opportunity, however, brings up a delema. If you manually create opportunities then you have the option of naming them in a way that you could tell them apart. However, if you create opportunities from within a campaign, the name is always the same. If a contact is in more than one sales pipeline, how do you know which one to move the stage for without going into each record and looking? It can represent a lot of overhead in time. If you are sure, given your model, that they will only be in one at any given time, then what you described will work perfectly. If not, then even just how you name the opportunity becomes very important.

Thanks John! As long as I have only one opportunity at a time. This is why I was asking the question because I was spending time trying to figure out which opportunity to update. It was taking too much time to manage.
I see what you mean by the campaign creating an opportunity. Can you set the campaign to name the opportunity with a different name for each campaign?

That might be one way to do it. That potentially could get extensive depending on how many campaigns you need to design over time though, but yes, you could then manage the name that way. I post to a script that allows us to use merge codes for the name to avoid this and has the added benefit of allowing me to set all of the opp fields in one move (which you can’t do with the campaign option) so I suppose it depends on how far you need to go with it. :wink: