Opportunities, for Contacts or Companies

[davidcknight]

It seems that LeGrand has been designed so that opportunities are attached to contacts, not companies. This is inconsistent with other CRM solutions (although entirely consistent with contact management solutions).

We are a B2B business, and sell our products to other businesses. We receive an order from those businesses, invoice those business and those businesses pay us.

Of course we engage with individuals, often many of them, in long and complex sales cycles.

However, by attaching an opportunity to a contact when that contact leaves the prospects company we have to remove the opportunity from their record, and attach it to another contact at the prior company. This is not only a waste of time, but also highlights the fact that while the engagement is with a person, the commercial relationship is with the company. The company is the customer, not the contact.

Interested in others thoughts?

Cheers
DK

[LegrandCRM]

Opportunities are linked to both Companies and Contacts. This makes perfect sense, particularly for larger B2B businesses where there typically is a primary contact and several secondary contacts for the opportunity you have with that company.

Any additional people that are involved in the Opportunity -- be they people within the prospect customer or other people (such as external consultants) -- are linked to the opportunity via the Influencers section of the opportunity record.

When a Contact moves to another company the entire history of his previous activities is retained in both places: his previous employer and his own contact record.

When you look at his previous employer the Opportunity record remains there because the Opportunity is linked to that company (as well as the Contact).

When you look at the individual contact you will see the opportunity linked to him too. This shows you that, when he was employed by the previous company your organization had dealings with him as the primary contact for that opportunity.

This ability to simultaneously link an opportunity to both the company and the contact, and the fact that these links are not lost or updated when an individual is moved to another company gives you an accurate view of the history of interactions.

The opportunity can not be linked to just a company, it does require a primary contact. One of the reasons for this is that there are several functions/commands within the Opportunity module that enable you to perform an operation with the primary contact for that opportunity. For instance you can send an email, perform a Word mail-merge, record and Activity Note, Task or Calendar Event without having to select the Contact -- the system automatically uses the primary contact for the operation you have selected.

If you feel strongly that you do not want any Contact linked to an Opportunity the workaround is to create a dummy contact at that Company, maybe call that dummy contact 'Manager', and link the Opportunity to that Contact.

[davidcknight]

Hi there

Thanks for the response. I think you may have answered a slightly different question as I may not have worded my origonal post very well. The issue is not that we don't, or don't want to, attach a contact to an opportunity - of course we do. The issue is that I cannot open a company record and create an opportunity, to which I may or may not attach one or many contacts.

The company, not the contact, is my prospect with whom I have an opportunity, and hopefully ultimately my customer.

As an aside, adding dummy records to a live database is to be discouraged I would have thought?

DK

[Shane]

The suggestion for adding dummy records to a live database was a work around and is not reccomended.

You can select a company record and select the Contact within the company to create an opportunity.