We will be focusing specifically on your Opportunity communications. These are the messages that go out before you have won anything, and getting them right is central to your strategy for growing the business, because they set the standard a prospect judges you against.
By the time a customer books a job with you, they have already chosen you. An opportunity is different. The person receiving this message is almost certainly waiting on two other companies to send someone round, and the first written thing you send is competing with whatever those companies sent. A confirmation that arrives quickly, reads professionally and tells them exactly who is coming and when is the cheapest credibility a sales team can buy.
There is an operational cost too. Every survey that gets missed because the tenant did not know about it, every call from a prospect asking whether the appointment is still happening, and every salesperson retyping the same appointment details into an email is time your sales team is not spending selling. Sales visits are expensive to run and expensive to waste.
This is where your opportunity communication templates move from being a simple feature to a core sales strategy. Set up correctly, they confirm the visit to everyone who needs to know, remind the property that someone is coming, and tell the customer when your surveyor is on the way, all without anyone in the office touching a keyboard.
Lets cover the fundamentals of writing clear and effective sales messages. Your opportunity templates are often the first written contact a prospect has with your business, so every one of them should be professional and easy to act on.
Best Practices for Writing Opportunity Templates
Clear and Concise: Get to the point. What does the prospect need to know? Use simple language.
Professional: Check for spelling and grammar. At the opportunity stage, a sloppy email is a reason to go with someone else.
Action-Oriented: If you need the customer or the property contact to do something, such as be in, provide access to the loft, or confirm a parking arrangement, state it clearly.
Tag-Optimised: Use tags to personalise the message. A confirmation that names the property, the date and the surveyor reads as organised. One that says "your upcoming appointment" reads as a mail merge.
Branded: Use tags like [company_name] to clearly identify your business. A prospect who has spoken to three companies this week needs to know which one you are.
Written for a prospect, not a customer: Avoid wording that assumes the sale. "Thank you for your order" in a survey confirmation is a small thing that lands badly.
Important Tips & Considerations
These technical tips will save you time and prevent common errors when building your opportunity templates.
Tip 1: How to Add Tags Correctly
Examples of templates that use tags like [opportunity_address_line_1]. You must not copy and paste these tags directly from this article.
Copying and pasting tags can cause them to fail to populate correctly.
Not all tags are available for all templates.
The only way to ensure your tags work is to use the 'Use tagging' button located within each template setting in your account. This button shows you the exact list of tags that are validated to work for that specific template.
Tip 2: Tags Are No Longer Filtered By Context
Commusoft's templates are now universal, which means every tag in the system is available in every template. That is convenient, and it is also a trap.
Nothing stops you inserting a job tag into an opportunity confirmation, and nothing warns you when you save it. A tag that finds no matching data does not fail loudly and does not leave a blank. It sends to your customer as literal text, square brackets and all. Always send yourself a test before a template goes near a prospect.
Tip 3: [opportunity_date] Is Not The Date Of The Visit
This one catches people out. [opportunity_date] is the date the opportunity record was created, not the date of the survey. Put it in a confirmation and you have told your prospect to expect someone on the day they first rang in.
The appointment details come from the appointment tags instead: [diary_date] for the day, [diary_service_window] for the time window and [diary_engineer] for who is attending. The opportunity tag group has no visit date, time or attending person of its own, so the two groups need to be used together.
Tip 4: How SMS Character Counts Work
SMS messages are billed based on their character count, and one credit covers 160 characters. It is crucial to understand that the data from your tags counts towards this total.
A tag like [opportunity_address_line_1] might be replaced by "22 Oak Street" or by "Flat 4, 127 High Street". Always write your static text concisely to leave room for this variable data.
Tip 5: Customer Preferences Override Your Template
Every contact carries their own communication preferences, set on the Contacts tab of the customer record. If SMS is switched off for that contact, no SMS is sent, however active and however well written your template is.
If a message has not arrived, check the contact before you check the template. And if the channel is off because the customer opted out, that is an answer rather than an obstacle. Do not switch it back on to make your automation work.
Communication Branding Settings
A key part of professional communication is ensuring your brand is consistent and instantly recognisable. While you are here to set up *opportunity* templates, these global settings feed into them.
Company Tags: ([company_name], [company_telephone]) You will see these tags available in your templates. These tags automatically pull this information from your main 'Company details' settings.
Navigation: Profile icon → Settings → Your business details → Company details.
Expert Tip: If you ever update your phone number in your company settings, it will be automatically updated in every template using that tag.
Related Article: Set up and manage your Company details
Email Signature Template: Instead of adding a signature to every single email template, use the global Email Signature Template.
Navigation: Profile icon → Settings → Communications → Email signature template.
Expert Tip: One signature, automatically appended to all emails sent from your account. This is the best practice for managing your email branding.
Related Article: Set up and manage your email signature template
SMS Name: For text messages, you can set up an SMS name, a custom name that appears as the sender on the recipient's phone.
Navigation: Profile icon → Settings → Communications → SMS name.
Expert Tip: This matters more at the opportunity stage than anywhere else. A prospect who has spoken to several companies will not recognise an unknown mobile number, and an unrecognised number is a message that does not get read.
Related Article: Set up your SMS name
Finding Your Opportunity Communication Templates
Now, let's locate the main templates for this course. There is one thing to know before you go looking, because it is the most common reason people conclude a setting does not exist.
The opportunity confirmation templates do not live under Opportunities. They sit alongside the job and estimate templates in Schedule and dispatch settings, because Commusoft groups these by what triggers them, a diary event, rather than by the part of the business that owns them.
Click your profile icon in the top right, then select Settings.
From the Categories menu on the left, select Schedule and dispatch settings.
Scroll to find three entries: Customer confirmation, Work address confirmation and On way notification.
If you configured any of these before the settings were rebuilt, your content has not been deleted. It has moved into Email settings, into folders named after the setting it came from: Opportunity template - Customer confirmation, Opportunity template - Work address confirmation and Opportunity template - On way notifications. You can pull that content back in rather than starting from a blank page.
How the Opportunity Rule Table Works
Each of these three settings opens onto a rule table rather than a single message box, and understanding its shape saves a lot of confusion later.
Opportunity template (left column): every opportunity template you have configured, plus a default row labelled Any.
Sales person (middle column): choosing Any applies the rule regardless of who owns the sale.
Email and SMS dropdowns: pick an existing template, or use Add new template to build one without leaving the screen.
Preview (right): shows the message in Desktop and Mobile views. This is where an SMS that looked fine in the editor reveals itself as four lines long.
Between them, the two columns let you say something quite precise: for this kind of opportunity, owned by this member of the sales team, send this message.
For most businesses starting out, one rule on the Any row is the right answer. Add the specific rows later, once it becomes clear that your commercial enquiries need a different tone from your domestic ones, or that one salesperson's patch needs a different phone number in the footer. Building eight rules on day one usually means maintaining eight rules that all say the same thing.
Click Save to activate a rule. To remove one, click Clear under the email section or Clear under the SMS section.
This lesson covers the two templates used when a sales visit is first booked. These are the messages that make the appointment feel real, and between them they cover both the person paying and the person who has to open the door.
Customer opportunity confirmation template
What is it for? This template confirms to the person who raised the enquiry that their sales visit is booked.
When is it used? It goes to the customer contact on the opportunity once the visit is scheduled.
Expert Configuration: Lead with the property. If your customer is a landlord, a letting agent or a business with several sites, an email that opens with "your upcoming appointment" makes them work out which one you mean. Name your surveyor, so the customer is expecting a person rather than a van. Note that there is no Letter option on this template, unlike the job confirmations, which offer all three channels. Opportunities are email and SMS only.
Email example:
Subject: Your survey is booked for [opportunity_address_line_1], [opportunity_address_postcode]
Hello [opportunity_customer_contact_name],
Thanks for your enquiry. Your [opportunity_description] survey is now booked in.
Address: [opportunity_address_line_1], [opportunity_address_postcode]
Date: [diary_date]
Time: [diary_service_window]
Attending: [diary_engineer]
The visit usually takes around an hour. It would help if we could get to the existing system and the consumer unit while we are there.
If anything changes, call us on [company_telephone] or reply to this email and we will rearrange.
SMS example:
Your [opportunity_description] survey at [opportunity_address_line_1] is booked for [diary_date], [diary_service_window]. [diary_engineer] will be attending. Any changes, call [company_name] on [company_telephone].
Work Address Confirmation Template
What is it for? This template notifies the contact at the property itself, rather than the account customer. It exists because the person paying is not always the person who has to open the door.
When is it used? It is used where the work address contact is someone other than the customer: a tenant, a site manager or a letting agent.
Expert Configuration: This message has to explain itself in the first line, because it is arriving from a company the recipient has never dealt with. Say who booked the work. Then say plainly what you need them to do. The tag set is different here, and this is the part people get wrong: [opportunity_site_contact_name], [opportunity_site_contact_telephone], [opportunity_site_contact_mobile] and [opportunity_site_contact_email] resolve to the property contact. Use the customer tags by mistake and your message to the tenant opens by greeting the landlord.
Email example:
Subject: Access for a [opportunity_description] survey at [opportunity_address_line_1]
Hello [opportunity_site_contact_name],
[opportunity_customer_contact_name] has asked us to carry out a [opportunity_description] survey at your property, and it is now booked in.
Address: [opportunity_address_line_1], [opportunity_address_postcode]
Date: [diary_date]
Time: [diary_service_window]
Attending: [diary_engineer]
We will need someone to be in, and we will need to get to the existing system and the consumer unit. The visit is usually around an hour and nothing needs to be moved beforehand.
If that date does not work, call us on [company_telephone] and we will find one that does.
SMS example:
[opportunity_customer_contact_name] has booked a [opportunity_description] survey at [opportunity_address_line_1] for [diary_date], [diary_service_window]. Please make sure someone is in. Questions? Call [company_telephone].
If you do any landlord or letting agent work at all, the second one is the template that stops surveys being wasted.
Next we cover the message that goes out on the day of the visit. It is the smallest template in this course and the one your customers will notice most.
On Way Notification Template
What is it for? This template tells the opportunity contact that your surveyor is on the way.
When is it used? It is sent automatically, with no action from your office, when the diary event related to the opportunity is accepted.
Expert Configuration: Keep it to one sentence: who is coming, and a number to call. There is nothing else to configure here, no timing options and no send window. Before you switch this on for everyone, test it once against a real appointment. On the jobs side, the equivalent message fires when your mobile user taps Travel, so the customer hears from you when the van is genuinely moving. Check when yours fires in practice, because a message saying "we are on our way" arriving on Monday for a Thursday visit does more harm than sending nothing at all.
Email example:
Subject: We are on our way to [opportunity_address_line_1]
Hello [opportunity_customer_contact_name],
[diary_engineer] is on the way to you for your [opportunity_description] survey.
If you need to reach us before they arrive, call [company_telephone].
SMS example:
[diary_engineer] from [company_name] is on the way to [opportunity_address_line_1] for your survey. Any problems, call [company_telephone].
You have now reviewed all three opportunity communication templates. Your sales visits now confirm themselves to both the customer and the property, and your surveyor arrives somewhere they are expected. The next article picks up where this one stops: the survey has been done, the numbers are in, and the proposal has to reach the customer, get accepted, and in some cases get financed.