Markets are dynamic, and understanding lost opportunities can reveal shifts in customer behavior or market trends. This information is valuable for adapting strategies to stay aligned with evolving market demands. Understanding why opportunities were lost provides valuable insights into areas that need improvement. It allows businesses to identify weaknesses, refine strategies, and enhance overall performance. They can focus efforts and investments on areas that are more likely to yield positive results, improving overall efficiency. Identifying reasons for lost opportunities encourages a culture of continuous innovation. Organizations can explore new ideas and technologies to stay ahead in the market and meet changing customer expectations.

In the Odoo 17 CRM Application, users can configure lost reasons for its opportunities or leads leading to additional insights on consumer behavior and identifying areas of improvement.

The Odoo 17 CRM application helps us create opportunities and manage them through different stages of the sales pipeline. We can schedule activities, prioritize leads, create quotations, and record lead history using the Odoo CRM application.

To create lost reasons in CRM, follow the path below:

CRM Application => Configuration Menu => Lost Reasons => New

The page displays all the lost reasons for the opportunities configured in the system. You can download data from the spreadsheet, create articles, add to your dashboards, import records, export dashboard data, and more using the ‘Lost Reasons’ action menu. Creating a new lost reason is very easy in Odoo by just clicking the ‘New’ button and entering the lost reason.

We can use filters and group by options for selecting based on different criteria.

After creating the new lost reason, make sure to save it by clicking on the ‘Save’ button on the window.

Now that we have configured a lost reason in the Odoo system. Let us see how this lost reason can be specified for an opportunity that the business has lost after a few interactions. For that, we can go to the Sales Pipeline.

CRM Application => Sales Menu => My Pipeline

The opportunities are arranged in Kanban cards under their stages. From here, we can select the opportunity to specify its lost reason.

The opportunity form displays information about the opportunity including Customer, Expected revenue, Email, Phone, Salesperson, Expected closing, Tags, Geolocation, Assigned Partner, Contact information, Marketing, and Tracking.

Now to mark the opportunity as lost with its lost reason, select the ‘Lost’ option at the top of the opportunity form.

A pop-up window will appear as shown above in which we can select the lost reason from the drop-down in the ‘Lost Reason’ field. Odoo also provides the flexibility of creating a lost reason right from here, that is without going to the Lost Reasons page by just typing the lost reason which is automatically configured in the system. To add more details on the lost reason, we can add it in the ‘Closing Note’ field. After entering the lost reason, select the ‘Mark as Lost’ button.

The opportunity is marked as lost by displaying a ‘LOST’ red ribbon in the opportunity form.

As Odoo is a very flexible and convenient system to handle, we also have the option to restore the lost opportunity at any time.

To restore a lost opportunity, Select the ‘Restore’ button in the lost opportunity form. You can now observe that the ‘Lost’ red ribbon disappears and the buttons such as ‘New Quotation’, ‘New Rental’, ‘Won’, ‘Lost’, and ‘Enrich’ appears instead of that.

Apart from using the ‘Restore’ option, we can also restore a lost opportunity by scheduling activities manually to have further discussions with the lead to improve our services and deliver what they are expecting.

For that, let us make use of the filter option by selecting the ‘Lost’ filter to access only the opportunities that are lost from the dashboard. By selecting the clock-like icon in the Kanban card of the lost opportunity, we can schedule an activity such as a call, SMS, meeting, E-mail, and so on. Click on the ‘+ Schedule an activity’ button.

The ‘Schedule Activity’ window appears in which we can mention the Activity Type, Summary, Due Date, and the Assigned Person. After that, we can ‘Schedule’ the activity specified.

On returning to the ‘Lost’ dashboard, we can now see the scheduled activity by selecting the ‘Planned’ icon from the Kanban card. Selecting the ‘Tick’ icon in the Planned activity allows us to mark the activity as completed.

If the activity scheduled has led to a positive response from the lead, you can restore the opportunity by going to the opportunity form.

From the ‘Action’ menu of the opportunity form, Select the ‘Unarchive’ option so that the opportunity is no longer marked as lost. If you check your sales pipeline, the opportunity can be seen there.

In the Odoo 17 CRM Module, you may set Lost Reasons in this manner. This feature makes scheduling, activities, lost causes, pipeline management, quick recovery of missed opportunities, and strengthening of client relationships simpler.