Sales & Account Management

Move deals from RFP to won, manage Company records, and keep forecast numbers accurate. Everything in this track happens in the CRM — but the work you do here feeds the estimation queue, the leadership dashboards, and the renewal conversations that follow. A deal that is logged cleanly on day one stays easy for the next six months. A deal that is logged sloppily generates cleanup work for four other people.

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Scenario 1: The RFP Just Landed

It is 9 AM. Your AE forwards an RFP from Louisville Athletics for a stadium LED install. Due date is April 30. You need to log this before the 10 AM standup.

Step 1: Check If The Company Exists

Open CRM -> Companies -> search Louisville Athletics.

Why this matters: creating duplicates creates merge work and splits history across multiple records. ANC has years of relationship history in the CRM — past deals, service tickets, contacts, notes. A duplicate Company cuts the new deal off from all of it, which means the estimator prices blind and the AE walks into the room without the account story.

Search loosely before you conclude the Company is new. Try the short name, the venue name, and the university name — "Louisville", "Cardinals", "L&N Stadium" — before creating anything.

Scout shortcut:

Step 2: Create The Opportunity

If the Company exists, open it -> Opportunities tab -> New. Creating the opportunity from inside the Company record links it automatically — no manual relinking later.

Set:

• stage = PROPOSAL
• bidStatus = RFP_RECEIVED
• businessUnit = TECHNOLOGY
• proposalDueDate = April 30
• league = NCAA

Each of these fields drives something downstream. Bid Status places the deal on the Bid Tracker board. The business unit routes it to the right vertical rollup — Technology, Venue Services, or Media & Sponsorship. The proposal due date is what the estimation queue sorts by, so a missing due date means the deal silently falls to the bottom of the pricing list. League is what powers win/loss analysis and case-study pulls later.

Common mistake: leaving stage as New instead of Proposal. The deal may not show where the team expects it in the bid flow.

What good looks like: the opportunity has a Company link, an owner, a due date, a business unit, and a league — before standup, not after. If you only have time for five fields, those are the five.

Step 3: Verify It Appears In Bid Tracker

Open Bid Tracker and confirm the opportunity appears in the RFP Received column. Bid Tracker is the kanban view built on Bid Status — it is where the whole team reads the state of every live pursuit. If your deal is not on the board, it does not exist as far as the Monday pipeline review is concerned.

Scenario 2: Moving To Pricing

The scope is finalized. You have told the estimator the requirements. Now you need to mark this ready for pricing.

Move the deal's Bid Status to Scoping once requirements are being confirmed with the client, and hand the pricing work to the estimation team through the CRM — not through a hallway conversation. The estimation team works from the Estimation & Proposals view, which is driven by the fields on your opportunity. If the deal is not flagged for estimation with a due date, it is invisible to them.

Open the Opportunity and confirm Pricing Complete is set when pricing output is generated or ready for proposal movement. In practice you rarely set this by hand: when the one-pager is generated in the Proposal Engine, the deal is marked Pricing Complete automatically, with the date stamped. Your job is to verify it happened, not to type it.

What happens: the pricing status and proposal due date keep the estimation and proposal queue clean. When Pricing Complete flips to true, the deal drops out of the "waiting on pricing" list and everyone can see the bid is ready to move.

Scout check:

Run that check every Monday. Anything on the list with a due date inside five days is a fire — either the estimator does not know about it, or the scope is stuck. Both are your problem to unstick.

Common mistake: treating the CRM as a diary you update after the fact. The estimation queue, the Bid Tracker, and the leadership dashboards all read live from the opportunity record. Update the record when the state changes, not at the end of the week.

Scenario 3: The Deal Won

Client signed. Now you need the revenue and forecast fields to reflect the win.

Record the value, close date, owner, and stage, and move Bid Status to Won. If the deal splits across fiscal years, confirm how the revenue split should be captured before reporting it — ANC's fiscal year is the calendar year, and multi-year deals carry their revenue in per-year split fields, not just a single total.

The completion-date rule: a deal cannot be marked Won without a contract completion date. If you flip Bid Status to Won and the completion date is empty, the platform reverts the status and sends a notification explaining why. This is deliberate — the completion date is what drives the backlog report and the renewals pipeline. Set the date first, then mark it Won.

Finance note: multi-year or mid-year split deals need extra care before leadership uses the number. A stadium install that books in November but delivers across two seasons is not a single-year number, and forecasting it as one inflates the current year.

What good looks like: the won deal has a completion date, a clean revenue figure, the right per-year split, and the proposal and SOW files already attached from the Proposal Engine. Anyone opening the Company a year from now should be able to reconstruct the deal without asking you.

Prove It Under Pressure

Keep Going

• Technology: Your Pipeline — the vertical-specific pipeline lesson.
• Technology: Managing Your Deals — deal hygiene in depth.
• Core: Finding Anything Fast — search patterns that prevent duplicates.
• RFP to Win Workflow — the full cross-tool map from RFP to outcome.
• Proposals & Estimation track — what happens on the other side of the pricing handoff.