Managing Multiple Opportunities for the same Contact/Company Record

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Please submit your request to tellus@infusionsoft.com. The more they hear this request, the better chance we have of it making it in to the development schedule.

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Thanks Lauren, I’ve done this :slight_smile:

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The problem with opportunities is that they are appended to the contact record and do not exist as an independent object. This is compounded by the company record also being appended to the contact record. This is an error in programme architeure and messing around with My Day and workarounds will notn fix it and is a waste of development time.

The UI which leads to the UX is very tired and does not facilitate effective working or reporting of activity based selling. IMO the integration benefit of using Infusionsoft Opportunities needs to be considered very carefully against the functional benefit of using an alternative.

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Actually, @anon84993822, that would be completely not true. Opportunity records are indeed their own entity running independently of any contact, though they have a connection to the contact they are assigned by the contacts id number (foreign key). It is true that IS did not account for the want or use of more than one opportunity record on a contact and did not provide a native way to accomplish this.

However, all of this being said, we have successfully implemented the use of multiple opportunity records on a single contact, each in their own unique stages using some api development.

So while it isn’t “out of the box” it is indeed possible to do.

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You could always have multiple opportunities on a contact. The problem is that the opportunities are not associated with the company. So if the contact moves to another company the opportunity moves with them and appears to be an opportunity relating to the second company, which is false data.

If you change the contact in the opportunity to a different person it wouldn’t move the email records. This breaks the audit trial.

IMO opportunities do not function properly due to the underlying data architecture. That doesnt mean you can’t get value. Nor does it mean that the Product Manager should not be challenged to fix an old problem and not simply provide cosmetic workarounds.

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The company record is also a separate record (in fact, on the contact table). You can assign opp records to companies but the have to be managed on the contact level to move stages within campaigns

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Please submit your request to tellus@infusionsoft.com. The more they hear this request, the better chance we have of it making it in to the development schedule.

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I actually have a better option than the email. If you head to https://infusionsoft.com/tellus we have a newer form that gathers customer feedback in a much more manageable way. I just looped in with @Mike_Hilton, who said, that we are transitioning away from the email address, and directing to the new feedback form

The email is still active, but we will be transitioning to the form I linked above.

So give that a bookmark, and please share with us. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Hi @Julia_Harold,

I think what we do might be what you’re looking for, if I understand you correctly.

When someone completes a form on our website, part of the follow-up sequence is to create a new opportunity record with the stage set to New Opportunity. It’s up to the person following up on the leads, then, to change the stage after reaching back out to the lead.

We have different practice areas for the different kinds of patients we see. Here’s a little bit of how we’ve organized our pipeline stages to work. We’ve structured our pipeline with the stages grouped by Order so that those stages for a particular practice area are closer together.

I set up our sales pipeline like this:

Name Order
New Opportunity 10
Unspecified - Call 1 50
Unspecified - Call 2 60
Unspecified - Call 3 70
Acu - Call 1 410
Acu - Call 2 411
Acu - Call 3 412
Acu - Engaging 420
Acu - Missed Appt 425
Acu - Cancel 430
Acu - Visit Sched 450
Non-Pt Inquiry 4000
Lost 4999
Won 5000

The Order field is what tells the system how to organize the stages. When a user manages an opportunity record, after it reaches the “visit sched” stage, the next stage for it to go to after that is either Lost or Won.

Does this help?

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Is it possible to create one or more custom fields to track the specific things you’re looking to track?

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Can you tell me more about what you’ve done with api development to track opportunities separately? What’s the end result of your development?

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I’m still adding more to it but we basically manage opportunities by unique names that are predictable. Say MarketingOpp~Contact.Id~ for example or AffiliateOpp~Contact.Id~ or ClientWorkFlow or Sales opps with the contact id appended. By doing this we can have multiple opportunities that we use a http post to reference the opportunity record by name from within the campaign builder (no human action required) and move that opportunity to a stage by the stage name as well. This ensures opportunity stage movement autonomy and allows for multiple opportunities getting individually moved to their respective stages but only the one we want, leaving the others as they are. That’s it in a nutshell. Infusionsoft still tracks the opportunity activity and proper naming convention allows us to know which is which.

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It sounds very similar to what we are doing, however, we are doing it manually. The issue for us isn’t moving separate opportunities through the pipeline but rather tracking the progress via notes/tasks/appointments in a rather long (3 months - 2 year) sales cycle.

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So with notes I make a call that raises a tag that is named by the opp and the stage and create a note in one call, again with a http post. The http post for the opps is used so that people don’t have to manage the stage moves. Say someone buys something. place a stage move called client into the campaign…no person ever has to handle it and you don’t have to worry about someone accidentally moving the stage of the wrong opportunity type. The POST for documenting accomplishes the exact same result. Takes the workload off of agents.

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I think our use case is pretty unique. We’re an engineering company with only 2 sales people. The sales process is very manual all around. Lots of personal follow-up to close a deal.

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Thanks Daniel,

This is very much like what I am doing as a work-around. It’s validating to see that you came up with a similar solution. I think it is probably the best that can be done given the current design.

Cheers!
Julia

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Lauren
I am new to Infusionsoft and think I may have the same challenge. I was looking for an all in one software to use As I was using mailchimp and pipedrive. I am in real estate and in pipedrive track my deals through a pipeline at each stage. Let’s keep it simple and say I have the same attorney doing paperwork on 3 different deals and each one needs something slightly different that gets added as a task - it will show up on all 3 opportunities - oh that is a big problem

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It is a HUGE problem. And it’s something I don’t feel like they are willing to address because it’s a major change in their system.

Make sure you submit your feedback to https://www.infusionsoft.com/tellus. The more people that tell them this is an issue, the better chance we have of getting it on their development plan.

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I am sorry to see so many having this experience. We have resolved for this for many clients already but given the overwhelming demand for this solution. It is clear that a more permanent solution is well worth developing.

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I am new to IS however we have similar issues - So we create a Company then link each new opportunity (different tender) this creates the Company and each new contact has relationship back to company but allows us to track each job x job with relevant follow ups.
Does anyone see this as a clear path to a similar issue.