States

All Opportunities will have a state assigned to them.

Opportunity states are selected from a pre-defined list that cannot be changed, however you can change from one state to another state as required.

• Create a New Opportunity and select the state.

Open

When a brand new Opportunity is created, it is automatically assigned an Open state. This makes sense because any new Opportunity that is added to Daylite can be assumed to be Active or as we call it, Open.

Won

The Won state is used when you have won the deal, but what triggers that feeling is up to you. An Opportunity may be considered Won for a variety of reasons, all of which depend on your personal feelings on the matter.

Reasons a state might be changed to Won could include:

• A purchase order that has been received.

• An invoice that has been paid.

• The client has provided verbal acceptance of your offering.

Pro Tip:

When the Opportunity state is set to Won, the End date is automatically populated with today's date.

It is possible to manually change the End date at any time if required.

In the Opportunity below you can see the following are true:

• The final Stage in the Pipeline, Close Deal, has been reached.

• The state is set to Won.

• The start date was auto-populated when the Opportunity was created.

• The end date was auto populated on the day that the state was changed from Open to Won.

You can also create a smart list using the Won state plus the end date to generate a list of Opportunities that have been Won the past 12 months.

Lost

It would be great if we could Win every single Opportunity, but from time to time things may not go to plan. If an Opportunity proves unsuccessful, you should change the state from Open to Lost.

It is important to note that when you set an Opportunity as Lost in Daylite, the end date must be added manually, as it does not auto populate the way that it does when an Opportunity is Won. The same also applies to Suspended and Abandoned states that are mentioned below. It is a very worthwhile exercise to track Lost opportunities.

Did you know?

If you keep track of both Won and Lost Opportunities over time, you will begin to gather data that shows your win-loss rate.

This is the ratio of Opportunities you are winning compared to those that you are not.

In this smart list example we have used the start date instead of the end date to track the Lost Opportunities over the past 12 months.

Suspended

Assigning a Suspended state signifies that the Opportunity is currently being paused, prior to being resumed at a later date. This could be due to a delay in a decision to move forward, or other factors that are out of your control.

Abandoned

An Abandoned state would arise when the client stops engaging with you on an Opportunity, despite your best efforts to make contact.

My Opportunities vs. All Opportunities

In the Daylite Sidebar your Opportunities are divided into three different sections.

They are:

• Opportunities Board

• My Opportunities

• All Opportunities

Opportuntities assigned an Open state, the current user is either the Owner of the Opportunity, or an Opportunity that has been delegated to the current user will all be found under My Opportunities.

All Opportunities contains every Opportunity, regardless of user or state assigned.

Another way to view all of your open Opportunities is to create a new smart list.

If an Opportunity has the state set to Won then it would no longer appear in the results produced by the smart list above.