How to configure the Sales Assistant/Activity Advisor for Opportunities in Sales Cloud

The Sales Assistant/ Activity Advisor is used in Opportunities to streamline and standardize the Sales interaction of your Sales team with the Customer.

This is of the greater use if you wish to adopt a structured approach in dealing with opportunities and acquiring new business. This helps your sales professionals, and especially new employees, to accelerate the sales process. As part of a sales methodology, the sales assistant guides you through the various phases of an opportunity and it also provides you with a checklist of suggested activities assigned to every sales phase such as appointments or tasks.

The Sales assistant proposes a template of predefined activities for each Sales phase in the Sales Cycle of the opportunity.

In this blog post, we will walk through the configurations involved before using this feature.

Scoping:

Assume you are already configured and use Opportunity management in your system, the below are the additional scoping Questions which needs to be scoped in order to use the feature.

PATH: BUSINESS CONFIGURATION > EDIT PROJECT SCOPE > QUESTIONS > SALES > NEW BUSSINESS > OPPORTUNITIES

Fine-tuning:

Once the above questions are scoped, you have to include the relevant fine-tuning activities into your project.

Activity: Sales Cycles and Phases

Click on the respective hyperlinks as in the below image to maintain the Sales Phase and Sales cycle.

Maintain Sales Phase:

In this Activity, you will maintain the Sales phases that the Opportunity goes through under each Sales Cycle. Though there are a few pre-delivered sales phases from SAP, you can create your own Z sales phases using the Add Row button.

Maintain Sales Cycle:

In this activity, You will create a Sales Cycle for the opportunities and assign various sales phases involved in the opportunity to a sales cycle in a Sequence. You can create your Z sales cycle as well.

2. Activity: Sales Assistant

Click on the hyperlinks to maintain the Activities and their assignment to the Sales Phases

Maintain Activities

You can use the standard Activities available based on your preferred Description and the Activity type.

The Activities that will be a part of the Sales Assistant are Activity Task, Appointment, Phone Call, and a Visit. The Activities created out the Assistant will take the Description and the Detailed Description maintained here.

You can create Z activities with your own description as well.

Assignment of Activities to Sales Phases

In this feature, you can Assign activities created in the previous step to Sales Phases in your preferred sequence.

You can also mark the activity as Mandatory. This makes the activity as mandatory in a particular phase.

We recommend that you include all the mandatory activities and carry them out in each sales phase. However, missing or incomplete mandatory activities do not hinder you from moving your opportunity to the next sales phase.

After saving this configuration, your Sales Assistant will be ready for use in your Opportunities.

Usage :

The Activity Advisor will be available under the Sales Activities facet of the Opportunity. If any of the activities are marked as mandatory within a particular Sales Phase, you will get a warning message as in the below image.

The Added column of the Advisor indicates that the Activity is already added to the opportunity. This is useful when there are a lot of activities that need not be performed in a sequence.

The Activities that are created out of the Advisor will be Visible as followup activities in the Document flow, Timeline, and the Respective section of the Activity type.