Lead to Order Process

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Lead to Order Process

First let us understand the different job roles used in a typical sales flow

Enterprise Roles in Sales Flow

There are several enterprise roles in the Oracle E-Business Suite sales flow:
Sales Representative

       A sales representative, also known as a sales agent, typically answers customer inquiries online, in person, or via telephone. This person may also set up quotes, proposals, and perform some administrative tasks with opportunities and leads.

Sales Manager

       A sales manager is the administrative professional in charge of sales campaigns and the overall sales plan of an organization.
TeleSales Agent

       A telesales agent is a sales representative who interacts with the customer via telephone. This person, for example, would use Oracle TeleSales to interact with customers.

Two Types of Customer Relationships

In a typical sales flow, companies may have different types of relationships with different customers.

In the Oracle E-Business Suite, two primary types of customers are identified:
Business-to-business (B2B)
Business-to-consumer (B2C)

The E-Business Suite uses a common data model (Trading Community Architecture) for addressing both types of relationships.

The above chart shows the flow of a typical sales flow.

Now let us look into some of the flows in detail

Sales Campaign

• Oracle Marketing Module is used to create and manage Campaigns.
• One campaign can have multiple schedules attached to it.
• The selling product can be attached to the campaign.
• We can also have a target list of customers for a particular campaign. This list can be either an external or internal list of customers.
• Once the campaign is launched the leads generated thorough it can be captured and followed up.

Convert/Capture Leads

A lead is an expressed customer interest that a sales agent uses to determine whether there is potential for a sales opportunity.

Leads are intended to capture the initial contact with potential or existing customers, gathering just enough information to tell a sales organization whether there is sufficient interest on behalf of the buyer to make a lead worth following up.

Manage Opportunities

An opportunity is a sales deal that can be forecast. Opportunity management is used to track information about the products that a customer has expressed an interest in buying. Opportunities differ from leads because the expected revenue from the sale can be tracked, as can the likelihood of closing the deal. Opportunities can also be used as the basis for allocating sales credits towards quotas, and can be converted into quotes

Create Forecast

Forecasting is a quantitative tool used to predict the amount of sales for a specified time period. Forecasting can be used by individual sales representatives or in a consolidated form by managers, to commit to the amount of sales that they predict will close by the end of the forecasting period.

Prepare Proposal

You create proposals to position a product or service as a possible solution to a customer’s business need. The creation of proposals is based on pre-determined templates, allowing you to use pre-existing content, and standardized document layouts, as well as information already stored in the database during the sales cycle.

Prepare Quote

Quoting functionality provides sales agents with the ability to communicate prices, discounts, and special offers that are associated with an item which is part of a sale.

Oracle Quoting calculates and stores the price of each item, estimates any associated shipping and tax costs, and when the order is placed it passes this information to Order Management which then determines how the order will be fulfilled.

Place Order

The below flow is a very basic order flow. The order process will vary depending upon implementation parameters and whether the order is placed through Oracle iStore or Oracle Quoting.

Close Opportunity

To close the opportunity on the Update Opportunity Page, choose a close status in the Status field, choose a Close Reason, and save the changes.

Submit Forecast

After editing the desired forecast values, users can submit the forecast to the sales manager. Once a worksheet is saved or submitted, Oracle Sales will calculate Judgment for each forecast value.

Judgment is calculated as the difference between the product category forecast value entered in the Forecast Worksheet, and the corresponding value in the Opportunity Forecast Summary. Judgment helps you to determine the difference between a salesperson's forecast and the actual pipeline for that product category, which can indicate that a forecast is incorrect.

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