Understanding Contacts and Opportunities

Hello everybody. My name is Drew and today we're going to talk about contacts and opportunities and the relationship between them in VIP cloud. Uh and so we're going to just talk about some common uses of them, some best practices. And so this is going to be a very uh CRM oriented uh conversation. Um and so first of all, let's just define the terms. So uh invite cloud contacts are people. And so one contact will equal one person that is in your system. And the opportunities represent business deals. And so these are two separate entities because ultimately you could have two separate deals relating to one person. Whether it's repeat business, you know, account expansions, renewals, uh things along those lines. That's where having opportunities and your contacts separate um really makes it flexible to track all different kinds of business situations or sales situations. Uh, and so in any case where you are going to have a a deal that's in your pipeline, you're going to need definitely an opportunity. And in 99.9% of cases, you're going to need a contact to go along with that.

After all, you're going to be having a person that you are communicating with, probably sending emails to, things like that. So there will be that contact as well as that opportunity that both need to be created somehow to do that and we're going to discuss how exactly to do that uh right here. So let's jump right into the software. So we're going to start off by looking at contacts. So I'm heading over to my to the contacts. Actually, you know what? Let's do this all from the CRM page since this all is all so CRM heavy. So in that left sidebar, we're clicking on CRM. Got the CRM sidebar open right here. We can see contacts there in that left. And so we have Jack Sparrow here who we're going to be focusing on. So I'm going to click on that contact record for Jack Sparrow. And of course, if you didn't already have the contact created, you can always click on that plus button in the upper right corner to quickly create a contact.

So, here, you know, if we were uh having sales interactions with this person, we would see all of that right there. We see Jack's information on this contact record, but Jack, it does not exist in the pipeline right now. And we know that because of this opportunities card on the contact record, it says zero opportunities. So, we're able to create an opportunity by clicking on this plus button right here. We can give it a name and we can fill out this opportunity record as much or as little as we need. In many cases, you're going to want an amount for it, maybe a close date. And then these drop downs here are important. So we got the pipeline for your various pipelines that you might be working in. You can have this opportunity go straight into a particular stage of the pipeline right here. And that if you're not familiar with that, it'll make a lot more sense once we are looking at the pipeline itself. And so we can fill this out as much or as little as we need.

So I'm going to hit create and reload because I want to be able to show you that now we have the opportunity an opportunity showing here on this contact record. So just by looking right here, we now know that there's a a deal that's going on and it's in this particular stage of this particular pipeline. And so let's now uh head over to opportunities over here. So in that left sidebar, we're going to move from contacts up to the opportunities page. And now we're looking at the pipeline itself. So here is that deal that we just created. And we can see that like the the name of it that we created, the amount, the contact that it is associated with. And so we can see where these two entities are coming together. In fact, we can see them both reflected right here. Now, by the way, uh if you want the your pipeline might not automatically show the name the contacts on the card right here and that card layout right there is how you can do that.

So, I made sure that the primary contact was selected from this drop down up here. So, that's how you can get that showing if that's something that you don't see, but you want it. And I like actually having that uh having both the opportunity name and the contact, the primary contact of the opportunity displaying so that with one click I can go to either the opportunity or the contact itself. And so now I actually want to show you as well when we click on the opportunity name, we're now looking at something that looks very similar to a contact record, but it's an opportunity record. And so when we're looking at the opportunities, we can see the associated contacts with them. Clicking now to the contact record, we can see the associated opportunities with the contact. So if this contact has work has had multiple opportunities that have taken place, we'll see a representation of all of them whether they are in progress, they are won deals, they are lost deals, what have you. You'll see a history of this contact and what has happened with this contact in your pipeline.

And likewise, when we are in the opportunity record, we will see everything that has to do with this opportunity, including if it has multiple contacts associated with it, which can be really helpful. So, if you're working with working on deals that have more than one person associated with it, well, you can absolutely associate all of those people. So, we're going to do that right now. So, going like looking at the opportunity record. And by the way too, sometimes people can get a little bit like when they're new users, they can get a little bit tripped up of like, am I looking at a contact record or an opportunity record right now? You'll see like this dollar sign icon in the upper left corner. And you'll see in the left sidebar that you are selected, that the opportunities are selected. So that's uh one way just to to know if uh if that's what's going on. But uh we're going to click on the plus button here to add an additional contact to this opportunity. And we can search for existing contacts.

We can create new contacts. Or we can also import a whole bunch of contacts if we need to. In this case, I'm just going to search for a contact. And I'm going to add that one right there. And there we go. We can see the multiple contacts here. We can see what their job titles are. Uh, and also what's cool is you'll see your communication across all of those contacts um in the recent activity for the opportunity. So, it can really make it helpful if you're trying to catch up to speed on a more complex deal that's working with multiple people and you can just see a timeline of everything that's happened with them in that recent activity. So, um, moving on to some best practices here. One best practice that uh that new users really need to keep in mind is that because contacts and opportunities are separate entities, they have separate custom fields as well and they can also have their own separate tasks and things along those lines.

So you uh you want to be mindful of not spreading information out across multiple places for a deal that you're working on. Most users find it beneficial to to have a bias in favor of keeping the deal the information relating to that deal on the contact record itself since that's generally like the contact is going to be who you're sending emails to for instance even though you will see the email history on the opportunity but u if you're not sure of if you want to have a custom field relating to a lead exist on a contact or opportunity. In many cases, just uh I would I would if you're not sure, lean towards the contact. That'll usually work uh best. I would advise keeping the information that is relating to opportunities really just as dealspecific as possible. Um, so like for instance, information that wouldn't m that would that could change across multiple deals that are relating to the same uh person or entity. That's generally going to be information that's best stored on uh opportunities. And I'm just going to show you really quickly too, just as a tip for how do you create these custom fields?

Well, we're looking at the CRM uh sidebar. The customize button is right there. And you got a card right here on that custom customization settings page for fields where you can click over on the contact button to create contact custom fields and you can click on the opportunity button to create opportunity custom fields. Another another tip here is for when do you want to create uh opportunities in your sales cycle. Sometimes users who are new to CRM will create opport they'll they'll have they'll want to create opportunities the instant a lead hits their pipeline or just or just like comes lead comes their way. Um, and this actually does work great for many people if there's a high degree of intent right from the get-go, but lots of users actually find it beneficial to qualify their leads a little bit before then graduating to creating an opportunity in their pipeline for that deal. That's actually how we operate at Viploud. there's a little bit of qualification happens first before we actually then create a an opportunity in our pipeline.

And um yep, but then for some people it does actually make sense to have an opportunity immediately created for uh all of their leads that come in. and those users might find it beneficial to have opportunities automatically created um just as a as an automation. So clicking on the automation tab in the sidebar, you can then go over here to this create button and this gives you a whole bunch of different times when that opportunity could be created. Like looking at this modal here that pops up for create automation. You can choose your trigger and this could happen when you add a contact to your list. Very commonly uh sign up form completion like a uh request more information signup form on your website. You can uh have a a contact and an opportunity created from that. Also emails being parsed can be an automation here as well as Facebook lead ads. Uh those are all a bunch of times where that might make sense. We're going to do sign up form completion in this case. Choose a sign up form. Let's make it a inquiry. And then now let's click to choose the action. And then you've got right here create opportunity. In this case you just create a template. Basically you decide how you want the opportunity name to be formatted. give it a summary and tell it where in the you know where the opportunity should be created like where what pipeline it's going to be in what stage it's going to be in and who's going to own it. Save automation and then you will have opportunities automatically being added to your pipeline uh based on this automation. All right. Well I hope that this has been helpful. Certainly reach out to us. If we can answer any questions about best practices or things along those lines will be more than happy to help. Thank you so much.