As a ATS and a CRM, Crelate understands you may have the need to track various types of opportunities. The goal of this article will be to discuss when that practice may be a good idea and the value of separate opportunity types.

Having unique opportunity types allows you to customize the experience for each type. Meaning I can have a different set of fields I use when creating Custom Opportunity Type A vs Opportunity Type B. For more 'how-to' here, check out our full guide on Creating Opportunity Types.

There are a few basic principles here, some obvious and some slightly more nuanced. We'll highlight some of the benefits of tracking and creating separate opportunity types.

1. A Clear Separation Between Opportunities: Are you using Crelate for hiring and consulting? Do you also host and track workshops, training seminars and other events? If so, it would likely make sense to track these as different opportunity types. Why? It's very likely you'll want the vastly different fields to enter when creating a Job vs a Consulting opportunity. For a job, you're very likely to need Job Title, Fee %, Salary, etc while a Consulting opportunity may have Scope, Hourly Rate, among others. You may Customize the Main Form to build your unique fields for each type. Additionally, Crelate allows you to set a Type for each opportunity. I may keep my Consulting type to Sales Only to ensure it doesn't become mixed in with any jobs.

2. Different Placement Forms: While this is certainly 100% applicable to the example above, it may prove more clear in the example below. Let's say your firm works in both Direct Hire (for salaried employees) and Temp (for hourly employees). When ultimately closing (winning) either of those roles, you're likely to have very different outcomes and Placement Forms. One will likely require a Salary, Fee %, and Bonus while the other may require Bill Rate, Pay Rate, etc. Crelate aligns Placement Forms with the closing of an opportunity. As a result, you may customize a Placement Form to align that with an opportunity type to ensure you're met with the appropriate data points to collect when winning that opportunity and in this case, placing a candidate.

We've created a video as well to detail the alignment of your Placement Forms with your Opportunity types to highlight the functionality:

3. Separation within Reports: To be clear, this is not the ONLY way to separate a report (tags or custom fields may also be used) but it is an easy way to segment your data. For example, when forecasting, it might be nice to know how your Direct Hire is doing vs Temp Hire. Easily tell where the most revenue is coming from and take notice as industry trends change.

Speaking of reports, looking for a little inspiration for Sales Reporting?