What’s in a Sales Opportunity? Every Field, and Why It Matters

The parts of a Recordbook sales opportunity, what each one is for, and how they add up to one deal record your team and your partner can both trust.

August 23, 2023 · By Joseph Lamoureux

What’s in a Sales Opportunity? Every Field, and Why It Matters

A sales opportunity is the unit everything else in Recordbook is built from. The pipeline adds up opportunities. Reports filter them. Forecasts weight them. If the opportunity is thin, everything above it is guesswork, so it’s worth knowing what goes into one and why.

Here is every part of a Recordbook opportunity, what it’s for, and the mistakes that make it less useful than it should be.

Name and description

The name is how the deal shows up in lists, searches and conversations, so make it something two people at two companies would both recognize. “Acme: data platform migration” beats “Acme Q3.” The description holds the context a newcomer needs in thirty seconds: what the customer is trying to do, why now, and who brought the deal in.

Account

The account is the company you’re selling to. Linking every opportunity to an account means a single search shows everything you have going with that customer, and the pipeline for just that customer. See accounts and sales intel.

Contacts

Contacts are the people involved in the deal, on both sides of the table: decision-makers, influencers, blockers and other stakeholders at the customer, plus the people at your company and your partner’s who are working it. You can pin one contact per opportunity so the most important person appears right on the main pipeline screen. More in know your sales contacts.

Products and services

This is the heart of the opportunity, and the part that drives the pipeline. Each product or service line has three groups of fields:

Milestones: close date, stage, confidence percentage and the date the line was created.
Financials: total revenue, total expenses, and the payment start and end dates that decide which period the revenue falls in.
Attribution: whether it’s a new or existing client, the source type, and who originated the deal at your company and at the prospect.

An opportunity can hold several lines, each with its own timeline and financials, which is how a deal with a license, an implementation project and a support contract stays one opportunity without blending three schedules into one number. The full field list is in products and services lines.

Notes

Notes are the deal’s running history: what was said on the last call, what the partner learned from their account team, what changed in procurement. Every note records its owner and a timestamp, so the opportunity builds a timeline anyone can read. See sales notes.

Action items

Action items are the next steps: what needs to happen, who owns it and when it’s due. They’re color-coded as deadlines approach, so an overdue follow-up is hard to miss. See sales action items.

Why one record matters when you co-sell

When two companies work the same deal, each usually keeps its own copy in its own CRM, and the two copies drift apart the day they’re created. Stages disagree. Close dates disagree. Nobody can say who sourced it. Recordbook gives both teams one opportunity record in a shared workspace, connected to each side’s CRM. The fields above are the same fields for everyone, so a partner business review starts from one set of facts instead of two spreadsheets.

The attribution fields matter most here. Recording the source type and who originated the deal, at the time it happens, settles the sourced-versus-influenced question before it turns into an argument at quarter end. If you co-sell with AWS, that same evidence is what keeps an ACE submission from being downgraded. The AWS ACE guide explains why.

A quick checklist for a complete opportunity

A name both companies would recognize, and a description a newcomer can read in thirty seconds.
An account, and the key contacts on every side, with the most important one pinned.
At least one product or service line with stage, close date, confidence, revenue and payment dates.
Attribution filled in when the deal is created, not reconstructed later.
Tags for the partner, program or segment you’ll want to report on.
A dated next step in action items.

An opportunity that ticks all six boxes reports itself. Everyone who opens it, on your team or your partner’s, sees the same deal.

Try it on your own pipeline

Recordbook is free to start. Every feature is on every plan, and adding your team or your partners costs nothing extra. Create your free workspace.