Opportunity Stages are used to reflect the stages in your sales cycle.

Implementing Workbooks often provides an ideal opportunity to review your sales cycle and introduce some best practice within your business.

Opportunity Stages are also used to determine which Opportunities are forecast in any given month.  If you haven’t yet formalised the steps in your sales process, you can use the pre-defined list supplied with Workbooks.  Alternatively, if you want to amend these, you can specify as many Opportunity Stages as you like but must map each stage to a Forecast status.  This status, combined with the Close Date of an Opportunity, determines whether or not an Opportunity appears in a Forecast.  Only those stages that map to either Best Case or Commit will appear in a Forecast.

In addition, Opportunity Stages can be assigned percentage probabilities, (ie, the percentage likelihood that the deal will close).  These probabilities then appear on an Opportunity record and can be used in reporting to calculate a weighted sales forecast.

To amend Opportunity Stages, click Start > Configuration > Fields & Picklists > Opportunity Stages.  Click New Opportunity Stage to add to the existing stages or click on an existing stage to modify the details.  You will see that one of the mandatory fields is Mapped Forecast Status and you can use the dropdown picklist to choose what Forecast Status to apply.  As outlined above, only Opportunities with a Stage that maps to other Best Case or Commit will appear in a Sales Forecast.

NOTE:  If you want to delete a Stage, click on the grid to open the relevant Stage and click Delete.  This will open a dialogue box where you must specify an Opportunity Stage to replace the one you're deleting.  If there are any Opportunities in your database at the Stage you are deleting, they will automatically be changed to the Stage that you specify as replacing the deleted entry.

Generally an Opportunity moves forward from one stage to the next (possibly 'skipping' stages) until it is either Won or Lost.  Sometimes however, you might need to downgrade an Opportunity to a previous stage.  To do this a user must have the 'Downgrade Opportunity to Previous Stage' capability.  (By default this capability is automatically given to users in the following groups:  System Administration, Sales Administration, Sales Managers and Sales People but can be removed by users in the System Administrator group, if required.)