Best Practices For Opportunity Naming

[captain obvious]

A recommendation I wanted to share on a best practice for Opportunity Naming is that you include the Account Name in the Opportunity naming. An example would be:

"Account Name"-"Opportunity Identifier"

The Opportunity Identifier would be something that would help identify what this specific deal is for (i.e., product name + quantity, order date, service name). So your Opportunity Name might look something like:

Company A - 20 Widgets
Company A - June Order

The reasons why this is recommend are as follows:

- Multiple Opportunities: if you have more than one opportunity with an account (i.e., 2004 order/2005 order, product a/service a) you will literally have to click into each Opportunity to find the information about it to understand what it is for

- Search and Navigation: if you look on your recent items tab, and you name your Opportunities by product/service only, you will see a bunch of Opportunities named the same, and will not be able to easily find the one you are looking for

- Reporting: for Summary and Matrix reports, you have a limited number of �Group By� options (3 on Summary Reports, 2 on Matrix reports). This is more relevant for Matrix reports, if you wanted to see Pipeline by Rep, Account and Opportunity � or Rep, Account, Product ⬦ you can�t. With only two Group By filters, you won�t be able to display all this information on one report

- Forecast: the forecast tab displays the Opportunity name only, so in order to know which deal is which, you will have to click into each, unless of course you can identify which is which by the Opportunity Name

- Lead Conversion: when converting a Lead record, the system defaults the Opportunity Name to be created to �(Account Name)-�, helping you enforce this type of naming convention.

[Summo]

Thats pretty much how we do it

[Gersh]

A great best practice and I wouldn't do anything differently.

BUT...

One note of caution.... because of the way reporting is done, it takes the first few characters of the start of the Opp name and then separates them from the last few characters by elipses ...

So if you're doing a chart, the label might not be what you want. We've run into the same issue with campaign reporting and have ended up with labels like "Outbound cal ... ext" (you can tweak the report by making the font size smaller, but then it's harder to read on screen.

- Steve

[flescor]

I'd agree with these observations. It's not clear to me though - are you populating Opp Name as a custom field that combines Acct. Name and Product name or some such, so that Opp Name isn't at the salesman's discreation?

Also, would it be possible to use a calculated field to serve up Opp Name pre-populated with "Account Name - " at the start, leaving the salesman to fill in the remainder of the Opp Name?

[KatieR]

One other reason to include Account Name in Opportunity Name: Automated emails sent to Blackberry users may or may not be able to see the account name. We use an email template with opportunity name in the subject of the message-the user who's quickly scanning his email doesn't have to open the mail if both the Account and Opportunity names are part of the subject line.

Kate M.