Empower your business with the opportunity sales process in India

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hello everyone welcome to another episode of shell black whiteboard will we help you get the most out of the Salesforce platform I'm shel black president and founder of shell black comm and Salesforce MVP we're going to continue our conversation around opportunities in this episode we're going to talk about defining your sales process there's a couple places you would define a business process in Salesforce Kay stage lead status and we when you work with opportunities and defining a sales process it's a little different normally it's just a single pick list but with the sales process there's actually some other fields involved so let's take a look so there's we need to find your pick list values for your opportunity stage in Salesforce you're going to have to define also a probability percent and also a forecast category so let's talk about what a probability percent is real quick so the thought is is if you are early in your selling process you have a lower likelihood or a lower probability that that deal is going to close or that opportunity is going to close so the thought is if if you have 10 deals and identified qualify to have a 10% probability I'm really saying that I think there's about a 1 in 10 chance that this deal at this stage is going to make it all the way through the sales process because with sales as we know deals are going to fall out we're going to lose deals customers go cold whatever it might be with that you also have what's called a forecast category and forecasting is really kind of a cultural thing not everybody has to use forecasting in fact Salesforce doesn't even display this field on the page layout it's not a required field it is required however when you're setting up your sales process so real quickly let me run through these picklist values pipeline it's something that's we're tracking but we're not close to settle not close to closing it yet best case when I see a stage like that that basically tells me is this is the best-case scenario that we're going to win this deal with all the stars align it's not that far along in the process it's not close to closing but we might be able to close it in this fiscal period something that's close to the end of our sales process we have a forecast category of commit and then we have closed for our ones stage and then omitted for our law stage all these stages are really in an open opportunity if you're running a report you say let me see my open opportunities any stage that's not a close one or close loss is considered open these both are considered close obviously once one one's lost so you'll notice the probabilities is getting higher the farther along we are on our sales process until we're 100% one or zero percent lost these are just some some sample stages I have a good blog post out there and I'll put these in our show notes of how to define a good business process in Salesforce a couple quick tips short and sweet action-oriented non-ambiguous if you are running a report and I'm and I see something like quotes sent it's very obvious where I am in the sales process I think I can tell real quickly if I'm in a new org and I see some of the out-of-the-box processes like needs analysis or perception analysis what are those get together as a team define those if you're using the out of box stages kind of shame on you it's just for example shake get with your team to find what your process is to make a sale how things move forward in the process and spend the time to define this probability if you do if you do set your stage to identify your probability will default to 10% and your forecast category will default whatever you've defined as you flip your opportunity stage forward if I flip it to quote cent probability will default on my page layout to 40% your salespeople can over always override it this is just again any deal that's in this probability we think is a 40% likelihood to close so that's how you setup a sales process I want to spend a couple of seconds on forecasting and whether that really makes sense or it's a good fit for your organization you do not have to use forecasting if you do not want to some people feel obligated because there's some reporting around it there's actually a whole module and sales force that you can enable my quick take on this is if you're a large multi tier sales organization you know hundreds potentially hundreds of salespeople multiple multi layers of sales management forecasting might make sense for your organization if you're relatively flat we've got a dozen or so salespeople that report to a sales manager or sales VP you probably can accomplish a lot of the same things you want to from a reporting standpoint in a sales management standpoint but just getting your folks good at updating a couple fields and the opportunity closed a stage and amount and really what I'm driving here is what do you want to report on you want a report on the opportunity stage or do you want to report on a forecast category if you are rolling out forecasting to your organization you talk to think about the impact to your sales people and adoption when you're rolling out Salesforce for the first time or maybe have a lot of new hires it's a lot for someone who's never used Salesforce before to kind of get their head wrapped around how to use opportunities and use the database well I encourage you if you're going to use forecasting start with teaching them to maintain the out-of-the-box fields close dates stage and amount and if culturally you guys really do want forecasting layer that on afterward make sure you've got some good traction and you get adoption that they're in a database and using it well then layer on forecasting forecasting kind of blows people's minds this little complex again it's really easy to cultural fit for your organization so that's my little diatribe on forecasting I hope you enjoyed it if you have any feedback and how we're doing there's a couple ways you can reach out to us you can hit me on Twitter I'm at shell underscore or black or you can email me whiteboard at shell black comm thanks for joining us and we'll see you soon