This is what a typical sale looks like at our company: a customer contacts a sales person, requesting a quote for a number of products. These products are comparable, differing in e.g. brand or performance. Typically the quote consists of about 4 different offerings. The quote is sent to the customer and (s)he decides which product is the best fit and orders that one.
In Salesforce this translates to: an opportunity with a number of products, and a quote with line items for those products. Currently, when the customer has picked a product, the sales person deletes all other products from the opportunity and quote and declares the opportunity to be Closed/Won.
There are a number of problems with this approach:
- All opportunities that are not Closed/Won appear inflated in the pipeline, with amounts 4 times as big as they should be.
- We lose information on which products are not chosen in a comparison by customers.
An alternative would be to mark products as being chosen (via a custom field), keeping the opportunity and quote as they are, but this would result in inflated Closed/Won opportunities and still not solve the problem of inflated opportunities in other stages.
Anyone out there who has dealt with a similar situation and found a satisfactory solution, without too many custom objects and fields?