@Gregoire LaurentIf TMF is going to implement Sales Opportunities, I would recommend you involve sales methodology specialists. for decades, there has been some de facto "standards" in this field and most CRM with a Sales Opportunity component have implemented sales methodologies. The best known and used are TAS (Target Account Selling) and ABM (Account-Based Marketing).
From an API perspective, this means that you probably should include 3 additional attributes to define these key concepts for Sales Opportunities:
Sales Methodology
1 ...* Sales Method
1 ...* Sales Stage
1 ...* Sales Opportunities
1 ...* Activities
These are important attributes on the Opportunity record are they are critical for revenue forecasting, sales pipeline and win probability.
it means that the Opportunity record in the API would have 3 extra attributes:
Sales Methodology
Sales Method
Sales Stage
the last one (Stage) would often change as the sale process progresses over time. Most of the time, the Stage replaces any need of an Opportunity status.
you could also add a sub-object for activities.
Indeed, to assist/guide the sales person, each Sales Stage could generate a list of pre-defined of activities that are associated to the Opportunity. (such a list is sometime called Activity Plan, Activity Deck)
As the sales person progresses through each stage of the sales process, different sets of activities must be performed before moving to the next stage.
(This is mostly relevant to B2B and/or for complex and/or very long sales process)
Is TMF also considering developing a Sales Opportunity ABE?
My 2 cents
Matthieu
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Matthieu Hattab
Altibox AS
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Original Message:
Sent: Nov 10, 2021 10:19
From: Gregoire Laurent
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hello Steve,
I apologize for this late response. Why do you mention here the ProductOfferingQualification ? In our current proposal, this attribute is not present.
Every salesOpportunityItem can contain one product which in this case is a link to gather the catalog objects that are the sale's target (productOffering and productSpecification). In this case, the product doesn't has an id. It must be considered as a shell which groups productOffering, productSpecification and productCharacteristic.
Hope it's clear.
Kind regards.
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Gregoire Laurent
Orange
My answer are my own & don't represent necessarily my company or the TMF.
Original Message:
Sent: Nov 05, 2021 11:01
From: Steve Ranford-Bragg
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi,
Apologies but I've been guilty of reading what I expected to be there rather than what you actually described in the diagram of the new proposal! In the current specification it has links for both Product and ProductOffering but in your version it only has a ProductOfferingQualificationRef which I'd like to understand the reasoning for removing products.
I would prefer to have the option of an offering or product rather than just a product qualification as that implies we have created and persisted a potentially very large number (in the case say of potential new FTTP customers for the UK roll out programme) of qualifications, but also I could imagine a situation where a company might be investigating the potential market for a product and so it wouldn't actually currently be available to be qualified until that happens.
I would suggest having a product offering as an alternate entity to give details of product the sales lead contains would offer better flexibility if this is adopted into the next version of the API.
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Steve Ranford-Bragg
BT Group plc
Original Message:
Sent: Nov 02, 2021 04:37
From: Gregoire Laurent
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi,
I agree with you, @Koen Peeters : "A SalesOpportunity references then a SalesLead and there is no need to update the SalesLead when a SalesOpportunity is created".
This is why in V5 we proposed to remove the reference to a salesOpportunity from a salesLead (see right side of slide 7).
Regards.
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Gregoire Laurent
Orange
My answer are my own & don't represent necessarily my company or the TMF.
Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2021 16:04
From: Koen Peeters
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi,
I did not add a link from SalesOpportunity to SalesLead, because the currently published SalesLead has a link to SalesOpportunity.
TMF OpenAPI typically don't have bidirectional links.
@Gregoire Laurent: It does make more sense though to have the link from SalesOpportunity to SalesLead than doing it the opposite way.
A SalesOpportunity references then a SalesLead and there is no need to update the SalesLead when a SalesOpportunity is created.
Regards
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Koen Peeters
Ciminko Luxembourg
Original Message:
Sent: Nov 01, 2021 12:49
From: Steve Ranford-Bragg
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Apologies, just reading this again I missed that the marketing campaign was not included in the model shared by Koen but (while absolutely not an expert at all in sales) I would have thought it would be a good idea to be able to identify an opportunity back to a campaign it might have been generated from?
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Steve Ranford-Bragg
BT Group plc
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 29, 2021 10:24
From: Gregoire Laurent
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi,
regarding Steve's last post, please consider the following :
in V4.0 : TMF699 only contains salesLead resource
In V4.1 (in study) : TMF699 will contain salesLead and salesOpportunity.
- salesLead represents and interest in a productOffering (or even just an interest in a specific category of your catalog)
- a salesOpportunity is created once a salesLead is considered as relevant by the sales team. In this case, the lead is qualified and an opportunity is qualified. Some sales tasks can be done by sales members (calls, quote, ...)
In V5 (not planned yet) : Both salesLead and SalesOpportunity will be modified to take into account some side effects that could not be be appliend in v4.1 due to backward compatibility reasons.
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Gregoire Laurent
Orange
My answer are my own & don't represent necessarily my company or the TMF.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 29, 2021 07:10
From: Steve Ranford-Bragg
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi Koen,
Thanks, that looks like it covers the couple of queries I had but is there any confirmation @Gregoire Laurent if that is the planned model for the next version of the API? If it is then I think we'd look to adopt this instead of the current version for our upcoming work.
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Steve Ranford-Bragg
BT Group plc
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 29, 2021 04:31
From: Koen Peeters
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi,
The carefull reader will note that the TMF699 intended to introduce two entities SalesLead and SalesOpportunity. The currently published version only managed to publish the SalesLead and not the SalesOpportunity.
A SalesLead is in contact with the marketing or businessDevelopment department. Once they feel the SalesLead is ready to buy it is eventually handed over to the Sales department that will transform it in a SalesOpportunity.
We developed a SalesOpportunity Data Model for internal use. This contains links to ShoppingCarts and Quotes. You can use this as a startingpoint until TM Forum publishes an official version of SalesOpportunity.
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Koen Peeters
Ciminko Luxembourg
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 29, 2021 04:06
From: Steve Ranford-Bragg
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hi Gregoire,
Thanks, are the details of the new entity shared anywhere and when it might be live, it would be good to take a look to see and how if it's worth altering our approach to what we're planning to do?
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Steve Ranford-Bragg
BT Group plc
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 29, 2021 03:59
From: Gregoire Laurent
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Hello Sourabh and Steve,
I understand the need of having more than one productOffering related to the same SalesLead. This can be used when a prospect shows interest in several different offers. However, due to backward compatibility issues, this request can only be taken into account in the V5 version of this API. Therefore, I will create a new JIRA to log this proposal.
Moreover, as you are working on the TMF699 Sales Management API, I avail this thread to inform you that we're currently working on a new resource for this API : the salesOpportunity. Definition from Open API Map : "Sales Opportunity is an 'opportunity' to generate revenue from a Sales Account or Sales Lead. Opportunities are the pending deals that need to be tracked and on which Sales Team plans and executes Sales Activities (Events and Tasks). Opportunities build the "pipeline" that will contribute to sales forecasts and planning."
Hope it helps.
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Gregoire Laurent
Orange
My answer are my own & don't represent necessarily my company or the TMF.
Original Message:
Sent: Oct 27, 2021 03:08
From: sourabh shrivastava
Subject: Multiple offers in sales lead
Does anyone manage to extend the Sale Management (TMF699) lead api to support multiple offers or products selected by Consumer.
POST /salesLead
I am trying to implement usecase where customer can select some of Value added Services or Products along with primary offer. However, api seems to support single object of productOffering or product.
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sourabh shrivastava
Architect
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All the opinion are my personal, not a reperesentation of my organization or TM Forum
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