Best Practices for Naming Opportunities
Jan 28, 2005
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.

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