Hi

We're just beginning to use Opportunities and are looking for some best practice suggestions on the following.  When we quote a customer for equipment, our offer looks like this:

Machine A or Machine B and Accessories 1,2 & 3. 

A successful sale means the customer purchases either Machine A and Accessories 1, 2 & 3 OR Machine B and Accessories 1, 2 & 3.  It is never the case that the customer buys both Machine A & B and the Accessories.  But having both listed in the opportunity inflates all the values listed in the dashboard, reports. Also when the Opportunity closes it looks like it was a less than perfect sale when in reality that's not the case.

One thought was to only list one machine in the opportunity.  This would keep the values more accurate.  However it fails our goal of using this function to help forcast machine sales for our production department since it wouldn't list the second product that may be sold.  Also when it closes if the other product was chosen you'd have to add the product in and delete the other.

Another thought was to change the price of one of the machines to 0.  This would keep the values more or less accurate, and keep our product forecasting more accurate.  Of course then when the sale is made you'd have to change the price back and delete the other product.

Is there something else anyone can recommend?  Have I missed something that already exists in SalesLogix to handle this?  Or is this something that requires a lot of customization?  I think this would be a common issue facing a lot of businesses.  (It's also one of the reasons we aren't using SalesLogix mail merge to make quotes.)

We're using version 7.0.1.1075

Thanks,

Kim

Hi Kim,

As far as I know, for what you are trying to accomplish you would need to customize SalesLogix or purchase an add-on module.

Power2Quotes, an add-on module created by Customer FX, would be a possible solution.  This module will allow you to create and store more than one configuration of a machine and its options while maintaining an accurate forecast at the opportunity level.  In addition, Production could run forecast reports at the quote level to gain visibility into potential machine sales.
Even if the quotes are never presented to the prospect, it introduces the flexibility to have more than one set of potential products for a given opportunity while maintaining an accurate sales forecast by using the "copy to and from linked opportunity" controls.

I hope this helps, and if anyone has additional ideas please share!

-Brianna

Good Afternoon Kim,

You could use a quoting tool that would allow you to quote many different options in many different quotes.

Once they have chosen the option they are going to purchase you would push those products from the quote into the opportunity.

Either way, if you close an opportunity, you should first correct the products that were actually purchased, then close the opportunity.

I hope this helps,

Dale Richter

Customer FX

Thanks for the suggestions Brianna and Dale.  I was afraid it was something that wasn't possible "out of the box".  I'm going to have to find out more about this Power2Quotes module.

Kim