I will be SHOCKED if I am the only user that has ever brought up this issue before. I want to see if anyone has a work around for my issue.
The Opportunities section of Infusionsoft was a big selling point for us. We have hundreds of clients that have specific projects (opportunities) that our BD team goes after. It’s not unusual for us to have multiple Opportunities for one Contact/Company at one time. These Opportunities are completely separate from each other (sales cycle, timing, budget, etc.) and the only thing they have in common is they are for the same client. So they need to be tracked separately!
Here’s my problem. We realized that if a Contact/Company has multiple Opportunities assigned to them, and you add a Task/Note/Appointment on Opportunity A, it will ALSO show on Opportunity B, C, D…etc. It will ALSO show on the Contact/Company Record. A task for Opportunity A has nothing to do with Opportunity B, C, D…etc. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why Infusionsoft was programmed this way.
I’ve voiced concerns with Infusionsoft customer service reps and they have submitted feedback to the product team. I’ve also emailed tellus@infusionsoft.com. But who knows how long, and IF, they will address this issue. In the meantime, I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions for a work around. How can I track updates to specific Opportunities?
Hi Lauren. It might be helpful to understand your process needs a bit more. You are correct, that Notes, Tasks, and Appointments are activities tied to the contact record. Using “Next Action Notes” and the My Day page is the most common way to “work leads” through a sales pipeline. For example, if I’m working my daily leads in My Day…
I see a list of all the opportunities that are assigned to me that I need to work on today…i.e, they had a next action date of today.
The next action for this opportunity is for me to call them and discuss a promo
After I do that, I click the pencil icon, add my notes to the call, and add the next action notes and set a date/time for me to contact them again.
The next action date will set the day that it shows up again on My Day. All that being said, do you have needs that are beyond that workflow?
That was a good thought but even following your suggestion adds the Last Action Notes and Next Action Notes (in the Note section at the bottom) from Sample Opportunity to any other Opportunities for that Contact/Company.
I guess let me explain my use case. We are an engineering company. We have hundreds of clients and those clients have projects. Each project we bid on is an Opportunity. The Company itself not the Opportunity. We may have completed 3 projects (Opportunities) for CompanyXYZ in the past and we currently have 2 projects (Opportunities) in the sales pipeline. These projects are completely separate from each other, other than they are for the same client. Our BD team works these projects (Opportunities) throughout the sales pipeline and our CEO wants all the detail of where the BD team is at on each Opportunity. When tasks/appts/notes are added, it gets really confusing as to which Opportunity the task/appt/note is related to. We need to track updates, tasks, appointments, notes specific to the Opportunity and not specific to the Company/Contact.
I may have just repeated my original post, and I apologize if I did. I’m shocked that this doesn’t seem like an issue for others.
Infusionsoft has been designed in a particular way which most users are happy with. But there is cases like yours that it does not exactly fit your needs. Sometimes workarounds or third party solutions can help out, but not always.
Now for your scenario, here are some suggestions, which may not be quite perfect.
Create New Contacts for each Opportunity - This would solve your problem, but it would create a situation that you would duplicate Contacts in your account.
Prefix each Task / Appointment / Note with the Opportunity Name - Although the information will still be stored in the same Contact Record, at least it would give you a way to identify the Opportunity it relates to.
Alternatives would be to use 3rd Party software, like QuoteWerks: http://www.quotewerks.com/ . But you would need to access if it fits your needs.
I’m struggling to understand why anyone would NOT want Tasks/Notes/Appts to be Opportunity specific. I understand our sales process/cycle is a bit unique but even if I were selling something simple I’d want to keep the Notes for each Opportunity separated from each other.
As for your suggestions…your second one is the route I’ve been going down but it still gets very confusing. You can’t look at one Opportunity easily and see all the updates at once. You have to sift through notes related to all that Client’s Opportunities.
I’m going to look for some 3rd party software like you suggested. Maybe there’s a plug-in I don’t know about in the Marketplace.
Since using Infusionsoft, the design of the Opportunities section has always been like that. Either people live with the design, or use some sort of workflow to get around the limitations, or use something else.
I have a product that I develop that adds features into Infusionsoft Interface. One of the recent requirements I had was to hide or rename the sub-sections within the Opportunity General Tab. That was due to a client wanting to hide things for their staff members. Not the same in your case, but it there is other people who want things done differently.
Your suggestions require changes within Infusionsoft in which I do not see happening. Not a lot has changed in the Opportunities section for a very long time. So I am thinking that a 3rd Party Service / Software would be the best way. If your requirements are critical, then you may have to offload the Opportunities to something else.
Have you considered something like a Project Management Tool? Something like Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/ or Teamwork: https://www.teamwork.com/ Those would track activity, do notes, tasks, etc.
Hi Lauren, My name is James and I am an Advanced Support Manager over here at Infusionsoft. I have been digging through your journey the past couple days surrounding this, as this was a bit of a tougher situation, and our team was not able to provide a working solution to your frustration with how Tasks/Notes/Appts currently work in Infusionsoft opportunity records.
I spent some time with our Customer Experience Manager today talking on this specific situation, as he oversees our feedback, and works closely with our development team on the feedback that was submitted. Pav was absolutely correct in stating that Infusionsoft has worked a specific way, when it comes to Opportunity Records, and Tasks/Notes/Appts. A change to handle things differently would take time, and development, and while it is not completely out of the question, change requests do go through a pretty rigorous process before development would start a project.
I feel that Pav had the best solution, when he recommended a 3rd party option, as this is why Infusionsoft has an open API. We want to provide the ability for you to plug in a 3rd party solution that can enhance your Infusionsoft use. These plug-ins that you can seek out give you the ability to go beyond what Infusionsoft is capable of doing, and in this specific situation, that would be the best route to look, as I know you want your database to be clean and not full of workarounds and duplicate contact records.
Our Customer Experience Manager did say that he has been working with our Product Team on some feedback that could potentially add to this core functionality, but this isn’t something that would change in the near future. We have to be very careful when we make changes or add to core functionality, but it’s not impossible to say that it could happen, as we are always adding functionality to the system, and most of it comes from customer feedback.
I would go with Pav though, and explore the option of a 3rd party plug-in that could give you what you need, without a workaround that could potentially create an issue with your database organization down the way.
I appreciate your response. I am very familiar with development planning and process as I’ve personally worked on a proprietary CRM (SQL based) in a former career. So I can appreciate the time it may take to implement a change such as this.
I’m disappointed that a 3rd party plug-in is the final suggestion. We were very much sold Infusionsoft on the capability to track opportunities and now I’m finding out that just isn’t true. I’ve done some searching and cannot seem to find any 3rd party plug-in that would do what we need it to do.
In addition, we were also sold on the capability of the Outlook Sync plug-in, which has major issues when being run in Windows 10. Duplicate (sometimes x50) entries being the #1 issue. I have a case ID for this and it seems like the Advanced Support Team is now ignoring my follow-ups on it.
All and all, I’m pretty disappointed that we were sold Infusionsoft with two key pieces of functionality that just didn’t pan out to be as robust as promised.
I was able to dig through and I found the cases that you have had surrounding the Outlook sync issue. I wanted to let you know that I have worked directly with our Advanced Support Representative leaders to get this looked at and replied to. There appears to be an issue with how the support rep sent this to the Advanced Support Team, which we are addressing, but first and foremost, we are getting your case worked, as we want to try to resolve the issues that you are encountering with the Outlook Sync plugin.
IS has made all the pieces for opportunities to work well and for proper RIO reporting. I would say that dis-connect is in not having taught/documented how all those pieces fit together and work together. But opportunities in IS are FAR more than just labels for stages in a funnel and directly affect many reports for ROI and analyzing where to spend money on marketing or to improve revenue so I think it’s not so much the absence as it is a lack of awareness.
I don’t know if anyone has pointed this out yet but there is actually a “Notes” section on the Opportunity record that is specific to the opportunity. It’s the section of the Opportunity Record labeled “Opportunity Summary” and within that section is the “Opportunity Notes”. The notes placed in that section are associated only to the opportunity. It’s not exactly ‘user-friendly’ but it might help you.
I also have the same situation of many opportunities from the same client and I agree with Heather_Barry, I keep the projects separate by using the Opportunities notes when I set-up the new opportunity. This way I can see each different one on the dashboard. Infusionsoft University has a good class on Opportunities, it helped me a lot. In regards to Windows 10, I have been complaining about this add-on since July 2015 when Windows released it and for two years they have ben telling me they are working on it, it may take a long time but 2 YEARS! It has been a real disappointment as it would really help my business but I had to shut it off.
I also have an issue with opportunities. In my case it is more the need to have multiple types of opportunities than it is having one contact with multiple opportunities, although that does happen also.
InfusionSoft seems to be built assuming that you have one sales pipeline with one set of stages and one beginning stage and one end stage. I want to use it for multiple types of opportunities with their own beginning, intermediate and end stages.
The primary difficulty with this is that there are only two end stages, one for winning and the other for losing. I’ve worked around that by adding a checklist to the win and lose stages that indicate which opportunity type was won or lost.
It seems like part of the solution to turn opportunities into a flexible, adaptable feature that can serve many needs would be to allow many opportunity types, with their own associated sales states, and then to allow notes within each individual opportunity instantiation that are associated only with that instantiation. (If they were long-lived that would be even better! Right now, there are only 2 notes and you have to keep changing them to stay current but no history is kept.)
I also have the same problem. We are event planners and it’s not uncommon to have multiple events (Opportunities) in the works for the same company contact.
The issue with opportunity notes is updates are not date/time stamped, which is critical to us for tracking purposes. Also, it’s difficult to pull reports/create searches around that field.
I have a call with an Infusionsoft Developer today (Monday, 6/19) to discuss the opportunity issue. It took a lot of effort to get a call with someone who actually works on the development team. I’ll make sure to bring up everyone’s feedback from this thread on the call.
I’m happy to see I’m not the only one that thinks the current Opportunity capabilities just aren’t cutting it for users.
Maybe good news on the Outlook Sync add-on. I have a case open with the advanced support team. It seemed like they stopped working it but tell me it got routed incorrectly and they are working it now. The issues we have with Sync mostly is it creates duplicate (up to 20x) tasks, appointments, and emails (notes) recorded using Sync.
