Opportunities, partners & deal registration

A CPQ quote usually hangs off a sales record, and the opportunity is that record: it carries the customer, the amount, the stage and the close date, and it is what the quote is raised from. Around it sit the partners who bring you business, the deal registrations they file, and the tasks your team works.

Core objects

Opportunities — the sales record: customer account, contact, owner, amount, expected revenue, currency, stage, probability, expected and actual close dates, lead source, forecast category, next step, and — when it came from the channel — the partner and the registration it started as.
Stages — a fixed ladder of seven: Prospecting, Qualification, Needs Analysis, Proposal, Negotiation, then Closed Won or Closed Lost.
Deal registrations — a partner’s claim on a named deal, with an end customer, an estimated amount, an expected close date, a protection level and an approval decision.
Partners — the resellers, distributors and integrators you sell through, with a type, a tier, a programme, certification and contract dates.
Tasks — dated, assigned follow-ups, typed by what they are about, worked from a task dashboard.

What you can do

Create opportunities, work them as a list or on a drag-and-drop pipeline board, and close them won or lost.
Raise quotes from an opportunity and see every quote raised against it on its Quotes tab, with the primary one badged.
Register a partner deal, approve or reject it, and turn an approved registration into an opportunity in one click.
Keep partner records with their type, tier, certification and agreement dates.
Create, assign, complete and cancel tasks, and track what is pending, overdue and due today.

The opportunity

New Opportunity opens a short dialog: a name, the customer account and an expected close date are required, and you can set the stage, source, amount, expected revenue, currency, forecast category, probability, description and next step while you are there. The amount defaults to zero if you leave it.

Opening a deal and choosing Edit gives the fuller form. That adds the contact — the list is filtered to the account on the record, so you cannot attach someone who belongs to another company, and the server re-checks that against your own tenant’s records when you save — along with an actual close date, a next-step date and, when the stage is Closed Lost, a lost reason and the competitor you lost to.

Choosing a stage on that form suggests the matching probability — 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 and 0 percent across the seven stages — which you are free to overwrite. The probability you leave is what drives the weighted value (amount multiplied by probability) shown on the record and rolled up on the board.

The owner is whoever created the opportunity. It is shown on the board card and on the record, and there is no owner picker in the app to hand a deal on to someone else.

Opportunities are not given a document number. Quotes, orders, contracts, subscriptions and agreements all draw a configurable number from Administration → Auto-numbering (see how a quote is numbered); opportunities are not in that catalogue, so the reference line under an opportunity’s name stays blank and you identify them by name. The Priority field on the form, and the Priority column and filter on the list, are in the same position — nothing stores a priority, so whatever you pick is discarded on save and the Priority column comes back blank.

Deleting an opportunity removes it from the lists and the board. There is no restore in the app.

The pipeline board

The board is the default view: one column per stage, each with its count, its total, its weighted total and the average probability of the deals in it. Columns scroll on their own, can be collapsed to a spine to give the active pipeline more room (Closed Lost starts collapsed), and each has a + for adding a deal straight into that stage.

Each card shows the deal name, the account, the amount, a probability bar, the close date with days remaining, the owner and when it was last touched. Two badges call out trouble on open deals: At risk when the close date has passed, and Stale when nothing has changed for a fortnight. Drag a card to another column to change its stage — the move is applied straight away and rolled back with an error if the server refuses it. The card’s own menu opens the deal, edits it, creates a quote from it or deletes it, and those same actions are on the list view’s row menu.

Two things to know before you read the numbers. The board and the figures above it work from your most recently created opportunities rather than the whole history — the summary cards from the newest hundred, the board from the newest two hundred — so on a large pipeline treat them as a working view rather than a total. And column totals add up the amounts as they stand, labelling the result with whichever currency is most common in that column, so a genuinely multi-currency pipeline will show a mixed sum.

The search box and the stage and priority filters apply to the board only. Switch to the list view and they stop narrowing anything; the list shows the page it loaded. Export writes the loaded rows to CSV.

Closing a deal

Stage rules are enforced on the server, so they hold however the stage is changed — from the board, from the record, or from the API.

Moving to Closed Won requires a quote. The opportunity must have a primary quote or at least one quote linked to it, and if it has neither the move is refused with a message telling you to create one first. (The API accepts an explicit override; the app does not offer one.)
Closing stamps the record for you: Closed Won forces the probability to 100, Closed Lost to 0, both mark the deal closed and set the actual close date, and the forecast category moves to closed.
Re-opening a closed deal into any open stage clears the won and closed flags and clears the actual close date. The forecast category is left where the close put it, so set it back on the edit form yourself.

The stage bar across the top of an opportunity is a shortcut for the open stages and Closed Won — click a stage to move there. It does not offer Closed Lost, and once a deal is closed the whole bar is disabled, so marking a deal lost or re-opening one is done by dragging its card on the board.

Quotes on an opportunity

Create quote — from the board card, the list row, or the opportunity itself — opens a new quote with the opportunity’s customer, contact and the opportunity link already filled in. The first quote created that way becomes the opportunity’s primary quote, which is what the Closed Won rule looks for. The Quotes tab lists every quote raised against the opportunity with its status and total, the primary one badged, and each row opens the quote. Quotes & approvals covers what happens next.

The Activities tab on an opportunity is not working — it has no data behind it and its Log Activity button does nothing. Track follow-ups as tasks instead.

Deal registration

A deal registration is a partner staking a claim on a named piece of business before anyone quotes it. In CPQ it is filed against a partner record and describes the opportunity: the end customer, a contact at that customer, an opportunity name, a description and product interest, an estimated amount and currency, an expected close date, an expiry date and a protection level (standard, extended or exclusive).

What makes it useful is that the parties are real records rather than typed text. The customer is picked from your customers, and the contact and opportunity pickers then narrow to that customer only — pick a contact and their name and email fill in read-only; link an existing opportunity and the opportunity name fills in from it. Changing the customer resets the dependent choices so a registration can never end up naming one company’s customer and another’s contact. The server re-checks all of it against your own records before saving.

Each registration is given a reference of the form DR- plus a timestamp and four random characters. That format is not configurable.

Approving and converting

A new registration is pending. Approve or reject it from the registration itself — the buttons appear while it is pending — or from the row menu on the list. Rejecting asks for a reason, which is stored and shown on the registration under Rejection Reason. Approving stamps who approved it and when. Approving and rejecting need the Approve right on Opportunities: registrations are permissioned as part of that area rather than on their own.

An approved registration shows Create Opportunity. That turns it into a real opportunity in one step, carrying across the end customer, the contact, the estimated amount, the currency, the expected close date and the partner. The new opportunity starts in Prospecting at 10 percent, with its lead source set to Partner and marked partner-sourced, and the two records link both ways: the opportunity shows its Source Deal Registration, the registration shows its Linked Opportunity, and the registration is marked converted with the amount it converted at. Pressing the button again just opens the opportunity that already exists — it will not create a second one. A registration has to be approved first, and it has to name a real end customer; a text-only registration cannot be converted.

Two limits worth knowing. Protection level, expiry date and protection end date are recorded, not enforced — nothing expires a registration on its date, and nothing warns you when two partners register the same customer, so the review at approval is where conflicts get caught. And the status list on the edit form offers Converted, which the database will not accept; conversion is already tracked by the linked opportunity, so leave the status alone and use Approve, Reject and Create Opportunity.

The registration list shows the twenty most recent registrations, newest first. The status and protection filters narrow those; the search box beside them is not wired to anything.

Partners

The partner record is who a registration is filed against and who a partner-sourced opportunity credits. Each holds a name, a partner code, a legal name, a type (reseller, distributor, value-added reseller, system integrator, referral or technology partner), a tier (platinum, gold, silver, bronze or standard), a programme name, a status (prospect, active, inactive, suspended or terminated), certification with its level, contract start and end dates and an agreement type.

Two commercial fields — a default discount % and a margin share % — are recorded on the partner and shown on its detail page. They are reference terms for whoever is negotiating: CPQ does not apply either of them to a quote automatically, so a partner discount is entered on the quote like any other discount and goes through the normal approval matrix.

The partner list is a plain list of your active partners with search, filters and CSV export, and rows opening the partner, its edit form, or deleting it. The search box and the type, tier and status filters are not applied by the server, and the list only ever returns active partners, so filtering for Inactive returns nothing — a partner you delete or deactivate disappears from the list rather than becoming findable under a filter.

Tasks

Tasks are the follow-ups around all of this: a title, a description, a type (general, approval, quote review, customer follow-up, contract renewal, pricing update, asset verification or BOM review), a priority (low, medium, high or urgent), an assignee and a due date. A task can also carry a reference to another record — a quote, contract, customer, order, invoice or asset — but the reference is typed in as an id and a label rather than picked from a list, and opportunities are not one of the offered types.

The task dashboard opens on four counters — total with pending, in progress with overdue, completed, and high-priority with due-today — and a table sorted urgent-first then by due date, with overdue rows in red. Filter by status, priority and type, and search by title or description. Row actions view or edit the task (both open the same form), mark it complete, cancel it, or delete it. A task moves through pending, in progress, completed, cancelled or on hold, and completing one stamps the completion date.

Two rough edges. The Assign To list on the task form offers only the first ten users in the tenant. And the status, priority and type filters narrow the page already on screen rather than the whole list, as do the page controls underneath it — the search box is the one that asks the server, so it is what to reach for when the task you want is an older one.

On mobile

One of CPQ’s four Android apps is a partner hub for partners themselves — Mobile apps covers what the apps do. It signs in, but it is not usable yet: its dashboard, Deals and Register Deal screens and its quote, order and customer lists all call a partner API written against a shape of the database CPQ does not ship, so each of them comes back with an error instead of a list. The web partner portal is built on the same queries. Until that is put right, register and approve partner deals in CPQ itself.