I would like to see Sales Opportunity Enhanced.
Sales Opportunity does a great job associating Estimates and Appointments with the sales opportunity, it’s all in one screen. But, there is more to a sale than those things. I would love to see the POs, Work Orders, and Invoices that are generated through the process associated in the same way. Right now, you have to go into the history screen to locate these things, but there is nothing linking them back to the Sales Opportunity. Like the tab for Appointments, where they are all in one view, another tab for all associated POs, Invoices, Work Orders would make Sales Opportunity a one stop shop for project tracking I think this would make it infinitely more useful and provide quicker access to info.
So for example, if the Estimate is associated with the Sales Opportunity that is late invoiced, link that invoice to the sale opportunity as well. Allow work orders to be created from Sales opportunity that also link to the sales opportunity and show in a single tab. One place for all info related to that sale.
Bryan, I had requested this option as well, with and email to James a while back. I thought it would be a huge value because we use Work Orders for all our estimates so we can track time we spend preparing the estimate which we factor in for job costing. It helps us to see how productive our sales people are on estimating. I tried to sell how powerful the mobile “Work Order” is with the ability to take notes and add pictures to help us create the estimate back at the office. At that time I could not convince James of the value and he did not think there would be huge interest from others linking “Sales Opportunity” and “Work Orders”. I hope your post will get a lot of interest in this feature request.
Chris, I agree with you. I think using the sales opportunity to manage a project from start to finish would be incredible. I feel like right now if you wanted to get a snapshot of a project, you need to have several different lists open. Even though History gives you a lot of information, it doesn’t tie-together related parts of the project. So to see it all in one view, just in’t possible. For our sales, there are so many moving parts. We are training our sales team to use opportunity manager for tracking their projects start to finish. It would be nice to be able to open the projects (sales opportunity) and determine all parts in motion and see what has has been completed without going to several screens. There always seems to be one thing that gets away from us because it’s hidden or in another area of the software. Unifying all related aspects of a sales opportunity, start-to-finish, to one sales opportunity would be very powerful.
Bryan and Chris, currently, there is a drop-down menu that gives you the option of selecting the estimate that is associated with the sales opportunity. You can also add and view appointments in a sales opportunity. I agree that there should also be an option to select a Work Oder and Purchase Order. Adding POs and WOs will be a good addition.
Does the job’s history form do that? When you create a job (Ex: 24 Hour Fitness > Store 1234 > RTU004), that job’s history accumulates in its history form. You might create a job when you begin the sales lead process.
We are trying to find a solution to see our sales and installation jobs through from start to finish and see how all teams are progressing in one screen. Sales opportunity has all the questions related to install and customer preferences in it, it also has a stage and follow up dates, it links an and solidifies the estimate you choose, it keeps appointments in view for that job, and it has user defined fields in view. It’s almost a complete package. Our salesman also track their orders (POs) and installs (WO) for follow ups too. With a lot of things in Aptora, most of the information is there, but you always need to look somewhere else to get a complete picture. If you use the history form, there is no stage tracking, questions, visible notes. If you use the sales opportunity, the work orders, sales, and POs, are in another view. If people need to look in multiple places to get a complete picture, they make mistakes, miss things, or just flat out don’t look.
I would like to use sales opportunity form almost like a binder for a job that has tabs for all the different parts of the job in one area.
You are right history has all the forms (WO, PO, INVOICES, ETC.) but again there’s no stage tracking, there’s no always visible notes (notes for jobs are always hidden a few clicks away), pop up notes also don’t transfer to mobile users, no profile or qualifying questions. Either way, there is something just out of view or reach to keep all hands informed and on the same page. Sales Opportunity seems just a few fields/tabs away from being that resource.