Main Views and General Use
Sales Cycle Manager lets you track and prioritize your sales opportunities in an easy-to-use Web application, and will help you streamline sales forecasting and sales channel management in powerful ways.
Sales Cycle Manager has three primary views: Planner, Forecast and IBO List. This General Help section also describes the Global Filter functionality and use of the IBO Form including Adding Interactions.
Administrators can learn more about settings and configuration in the Admin & Setup section of this site. There is also a Glossary of Terms. If you have any questions that are not answered herein, please contact us.
Planner
The Sales Cycle Planner view is the first screen you will see when you log in to Sales Cycle Manager. It shows all of your open sales opportunities divided into groups based on priority.This helps each salesperson to focus their selling efforts most effectively.
Priority is determined based on the information that has been entered for each opportunity (referred to as IBOs, Identified Business Opportunities), and includes: Review First, Review Second, Review Third, Break Through Needed, Leave it Alone, and Overdue.
Forecast
The Sales Forecast view is a powerful forecasting tool that shows all open sales opportunities categorized by closing date ("When Will It Happen?").
You can easily set any forecast date range you would like to review and choose to see a forecast by Weighted (Value x Probability), UnWeighted (Total Value), or Committed (User selected) forecast types. The graphs allow you to group each chart by All IBOs, Product, Product Group, or Owner.
More than just a report-generator, the Forecast view creates a list of all of the IBOs for the defined date range. This list can be sorted, for instance, by Value. Double-clicking on an IBO will open the IBO Form for that opportunity where you can see all the details for that IBO. Combined with the Global Filter, the Forecast view gives quick access to real-time sales forecasts for any role or segment of your organization (see Roles).
The IBO List shows all sales opportunities and can be filtered by IBO Status: Open, Won, Lost, or Cancelled.
You can search all IBOs based on IBO Status, IBO#, Contact or Company.
Global Filter
For some sales organizations it is important to be able to set up a sales hierarchy and enable security levels for IBO access. This is important as well if your company is including Distributors or other Channel Partners in the use of Sales Cycle Manager On Demand.
Global Filter can be applied to any view (Planner, Forecast or IBO List) and will restrict the IBOs shown to the role selected in Global Filter.
With Global Filter, you can easily see "through the eyes" of any role that you have access to.
IBO Form
The IBO Form displays the details of a specific sales opportunity. From this form, you can update the various items of information regarding the opportunity and review the feedback generated by the Sales Cycle Dashboard. Users who have write access can update the IBO Form by clicking the "Edit" button at the top.
Sales Cycle Manager gives you the option to receive an even greater degree of feedback by switching on the Sales Advisor Expert feature. The Sales Cycle Dashboard displays a graphical representation of the sales cycle, sales advice, and the strategic details of the sales opportunity. It can provide this high level of feedback based on information you enter in the Sales Environment section which records and references key elements of a sale, such as competitive pressure, funding status, decision makers, relationships and more.
