To use your platform to its true potential, you’ll need to master the Opportunities section.  

This is the area where you’ll organize and monitor a contact’s progression through your sales Pipeline.

First up, I’m going to show you how to understand the Opportunities section, and later in this article, we’ll create a new Opportunity from start to finish.

Click Opportunities on the left menu.

This will take you to your Opportunities view.

The first thing you'll want to do is enter a date range for which Opportunities you'd like to view. Click Select Date and Time to open the calendar pop-up.

On the pop-up, you can select your date range by first clicking a start date and then clicking an end date. All days in the range will then be highlighted - click the green checkmark in the bottom right to display your Opportunities for the range.

You can also select a date range by clicking one of the preset options to the left of the calendar.

After selecting your date range, you can sort the results in either ascending or descending order by the date the Opportunity was added.

In addition, you can filter your results using the four dropdown menus to the right. The first of these dropdowns is used to view Opportunities from a specific Pipeline.

In this example, we've already created two demos - TestPipeline and TestPipeline2. I'll select TestPipeline.

Next, you can filter your view by who the Opportunity is assigned to. 

All of your CRM users will appear in this dropdown list. For this article, we've created a user named Agency Agent. Selecting All will return all your Opportunities regardless of who they're assigned to.

In the same manner, you can filter Opportunities by the campaigns you've created in your CRM.

Lastly, you can choose to only view Opportunities that have a specific status. The available statuses are Open, Won, Lost, and Abandoned.

To the right of these dropdowns is a "Search" field where you can search for an Opportunity by entering a contact name.

The green "New" button allows you to create a new opportunity, but as mentioned before, we’ll talk about adding a new Opportunity a little later in this article.

The final option on your menu bar is a blue download symbol. You can click here to download a CSV of all your Opportunities.

Now let's look at the view directly below the menu bar. 

What you'll see here are all the Opportunities that match your variables from above. Notice that Opportunities are arranged according to their Pipeline Stage. In this demo, we've created three Stages for our Pipeline - Lead, Booked Call Stage, and Attended Call Stage.

Our example has only 1 Opportunity - it's the card with the name, Test Contact. And it's currently in the Lead Stage.

An opportunity card will display the contact's name and lead value. In addition, there are links to conversations and tasks at the bottom of the card.

Clicking these links will take you to the Conversations or Tasks section of your CRM.

You can customize what information is shown on each Opportunity card by clicking the dropdown at the top of the view, and a list of available variables will appear. Check the boxes for the information you'd like to be displayed.

From the Opportunity view, you can click and drag an Opportunity card to other Stages on the screen. If you move it from one Pipeline Stage to another, the Stage for the Opportunity will be automatically updated.

You can also drag a card down to the bottom of the screen to change its status to Lost, Abandoned, or Won.

And those are the basics of understanding your Opportunities view.

Now, let's go back to the top and create a new Opportunity.

In the top right of the view, click the New button.

This opens a popup for the new Opportunity.

First, you'll need to add info about the contact. Click the Contact name field and start typing the contact's name. As you type, a list of matching contacts will appear and you can click on the contact you want. I typed T and Test Contact appeared. I'll select this contact by clicking it.

When you select a contact, the remaining contact info fields will be auto-filled from the contact's existing details. As you can see, the Test Contact's email address was added.

If that contact is already in a campaign, applied tags will show up here. You can add more tags or remove the existing tags directly within the pop-up.

Below the contact Info section, you can make changes to the Opportunity. The Opportunity name field is set to the contact's name by default.

Let’s select a Pipeline for the Opportunity. 

Our example is currently set to TestPipeline, but we're going to change it. I click the dropdown menu and then click TestPipeline2 to select it.

The Stage dropdown lists all Stages of your selected Pipeline. In our case, that's TestPipeline2, which has Lead, Booked Call, and Attended Call Stages. We're going to say our Test Contact is in the Booked Call Stage. Click the dropdown and then select the Stage your Opportunity is in.

The Status dropdown list gives you four status options. An opportunity can be Open, Won, Lost or Abandoned:

• Open means a contact hasn't decided to sign up for the campaign yet.

• Won is for contacts that have completed the sign up process.

• Lost means the customer has refused. However, marking a customer as Lost doesn't delete the contact or opportunity. That's because they might not be ready now, but could change their mind later.

• Abandoned status is used for contacts that you're no longer pursuing. This could be because they're not a good fit for your campaign or for other reasons. Abandoned opportunities are not calculated into your conversion rate and won't affect your won/lost data.

The next field is Leed Value. Here, you can assign a dollar value to the Opportunity.

In the Owner field, you can assign this Opportunity to another user in your CRM.

And Source tells you where the Opportunity came from. Some examples could be a website form or from Facebook traffic.

After you've customized your new Opportunity, click Add to save it.

You can also delete an existing opportunity from this pop-up by clicking Delete.

Remember that we set the Stage of this new Opportunity as Booked Call? When it's created, the Opportunity automatically appears in the Booked Call column on the main view.

You may have noticed that there were three other tabs on the Opportunity pop-up. We’re going to explore them now.

Click anywhere on the white space of the card.

This opens the Opportunity pop-up again. Click the Add/Edit Appointment tab at the top.

If you've already created a calendar, then you can easily set a new appointment or edit an existing one.

The next tab is Tasks, which lets you add tasks to your Opportunity, such as making a follow-up phone call, which is what we're going to do in this example.

Click the Tasks tab to add a new task, and then complete the Task fields:

• Name: I've named the task "Phone Call.” 

• Description: I've added, "Make a follow up call."

• Assign To: Assign a Task to any user. We're going to leave it Not assigned.

• Due Date: Click on the field and then select a date from the calendar.

Click the green update button to add this task to the Opportunity.

The last tab on your Opportunity pop-up is Notes. With this feature, you can write notes about the Opportunity. Keep in mind that these notes are not accessible by the contact - only you can see them.

I'm going to add a simple note here, “Do not contact customers on Sundays.”

After you enter your Note text, be sure to click Save.

Now the note appears at the top of the tab. You can edit notes by clicking the pencil icon or delete them with the trash icon.

As before, click Update when you're done.

This will close the pop-up and take you back to the main Opportunities view.

But something has changed… 

Take a closer look at the Test Contact card and you'll see a small “i” icon. This lets you know that there's a note on the card. And when you hover over the “i,” that note will conveniently be displayed.

Mastering Opportunities is an integral part of optimizing your sales process and I hope you've enjoyed this article.