5 business benefits of using opportunities in Salesforce
Salesforce Opportunities: stages, forecasting, competitor tracking & HubSpot sync
Salesforce CRM is a sales and service platform built to help teams manage thousands of leads and respond to them in real time.
One of its most powerful features is the opportunity object, particularly opportunity stages, which guide sales reps through the sales pipeline.
Opportunities allow businesses to track potential sales, optimize funnels, and improve conversion rates.
This guide explains what an opportunity is in Salesforce, how opportunity stages work, the benefits of using them, and how to integrate Salesforce opportunities with HubSpot if your team also runs on HubSpot CRM.
What is an opportunity in Salesforce?
An opportunity in Salesforce represents a qualified lead with a high likelihood of making a purchase or conversion.
Once a lead is qualified, it becomes an opportunity, allowing the sales team to:
- Track the progress of active deals through the pipeline.
- Forecast potential revenue from each deal.
- Monitor workload and bandwidth across sales reps.
You might benefit from reading our guide on the difference between Salesforce Leads and Opportunities.
Within the object manager, administrators should create a custom 'competitor' picklist or lookup field on the opportunity, as the native 'competitors' related list is a legacy feature with limited reporting capabilities in Lightning.
Each stage is mapped to a probability percentage and a forecast category (such as "pipeline," "best case," or "commit") to feed into your revenue projections.
Additionally, within each opportunity record, users can upload files (e.g., contract templates, client forms), assign tasks, and capture key details to streamline deal management.
How to manage opportunity stages in Salesforce
To create or edit an opportunity stage:
- Go to Settings > Setup (or Edit Object for existing Opportunities) > Object Manager > Opportunity Object > Fields & Relationships > Stage.
- Use the stage picklist to select from Salesforce’s pre-defined stages or add custom ones.
A typical sales funnel might look like this:
Discovery > Proposal Requested > Proposal Provided > Pending Signature > Closed
For managing stages:
- Use the Kanban view (switchable from Grid view in the upper right corner) to visualize all opportunities across stages.
- Drag and drop records to move deals between stages as they progress.
- Within each stage, click into Opportunities to assign tasks, upload account files, check budgets, and review past actions that led to the current stage.
5 benefits of using opportunities in Salesforce
1. Predict revenue from a potential sale
The opportunity amount field aggregates the value of products associated with an opportunity. This helps prioritize deals with higher revenue potential.
2. Forecast revenue for the organization
The Forecasts tab aggregates opportunity data to project future revenue.
Forecasts can be segmented by forecast categories, product groups, or time periods.
This gives leaders a forward-looking view and helps teams focus on the strategies most likely to drive results.
3. Track deal changes to take action
Salesforce provides visual cues to help reps identify which deals are moving and which are stalling.
- Pipeline Inspection: In this specialized list view, Salesforce uses color-coded arrows (green for increases, red for decreases/delays) to flag changes in deal amounts or close dates. Reps can hover over these indicators to see the previous value and who performed the update.
- Kanban View: This board view uses Opportunity Alerts (visual icons that flag deals with overdue tasks or no scheduled activities.) This makes it easy to prioritize high-value opportunities that require immediate follow-up to keep them moving through the stages.
4. Track competitors in opportunities
Within the Opportunity record, reps can attach competitors:
- Avoid the manual 'Competitors' related list; instead, use a custom competitor picklist to ensure you can run clean 'Win/Loss' reports in Lightning.
- Reps can log lost deals under a Closed Lost reason to track competitor wins and adapt strategies.
5. Track products with opportunity products
Salesforce supports opportunity products, which link products and quantities to deals. This enables:
- Accurate revenue tracking per opportunity.
- Product-level reporting to see what’s selling.
- Use of custom Price Books to adjust pricing for territories or teams.
- Enable product schedules to track quantity or revenue distributions over time, ensuring your forecasts accurately reflect recurring service renewals or staggered shipments.
Integrating Salesforce opportunities with HubSpot deals
If your organization uses HubSpot alongside Salesforce, syncing Opportunities into HubSpot Deals allows both marketing and sales teams to report on revenue and deal stages in one place.
To sync opportunities:
- Go to Settings (gear icon) > Integrations > Connected Apps > Salesforce, then select the Sync Settings tab for Deals.
- To maintain a continuous sync, go to the Salesforce Integration settings in HubSpot > Sync Settings > Deals to map your Opportunity fields and stages to HubSpot Deals.
This ensures that all new and existing opportunities flow into HubSpot for unified reporting.
More resources
If this guide helped, you’ll probably get value out of the rest of our HubSpot–Salesforce integration write-ups in the Knowledge Bank.
If you need more information on this issue, hop over to Salesforce’s official support article.
And if you’d rather skip the DIY and have someone untangle the whole thing with you, drop us a form. We live and breathe HubSpot–Salesforce integrations, so you don’t have to.
