Configuring an Opportunity within a Sales Cycle

The term Buying Center refers to individuals that could be influencers in the customer's decision to buy or to go with a competitor. Understanding who has influence over decision makers and their thoughts on the products and services provided in an opportunity or quote gives a sales team time to plan and react.

You can create a comprehensive buying center to:

Identify those persons involved in the buying process, and determine their degree of influence.

Enter key attributes for each individual, for example, their opinion of your solution and personal value proposition.

There are five out of the box attribute types provided as standard SAP Sales Cloud values:

• Attitude
• Level of influence
• Description
• Strength of influence
• Interaction frequency

Now let's take a look at how you can set up a Buying Center within the system.

Party roles and determination rules help in automatically determining the involved parties for business transactions and their related documents. Party roles are the roles that everyone plays in the sales process. For example; a contact person or sales manager. Understanding who needs to be involved in meetings, phone calls, appointments, and opportunities that involve revenue distribution is key.  

Determination rules can be used to make sure that all of the parties involved in the sales process are informed and included in all activities.  The system will be able to automatically add those parties to any document or activity they should be involved in.  Determination rules are set up in configuration. 

​In this video, you'll see how you can determine a party role within the system. 

There are several tools to help manage your opportunities. 

The opportunity hierarchy can help maintain a hierarchy of parent and child opportunities, and the Parent Opportunity ID can be added as a field to the header.

Opportunity will show all Child Opportunities in hierarchy, but Parent Hierarchy shows in field. 

The Parent opportunity will then show all Child Opportunities grouped and linked together for easier maintenance and reporting.

Opportunity hierarchies are especially useful if you want to:

• Combine several sales projects that are connected
• Structure sales projects that consist of several sub-projects
• Link a sub-opportunity to a product
• Report on the entire hierarchy of opportunities