The ultimate guide to building up Opportunity Management in Salesforce

Once you’ve learned how to customize your Salesforce opportunity stages, you can consider enhancing opportunity management in Salesforce to improve visibility for sales managers and make their job more effective. Salesforce CRM has numerous options to improve your opportunity management. Backed by rich experience in Salesforce consulting, we’ve outlined the following checklist of activities that can increase your deal conversions.

1. Use Activity Tracking

Salesforce CRM not only keeps information about all open deals, but also allows tracking activities related to a particular deal. In particular, managers can use Salesforce’s Activity Tracking to see log calls or emails sent by a particular sales representative as well as create an Activity Summary Report to know how many times the company has been in touch with a lead.

2. Enable Stage History Tracking

Besides, Salesforce functionality allows tracking Stage History on opportunities. With this feature, companies can create workflows rules that “date-stamp” each stage or status value. Thus, using Stage History tracking, companies can measure the velocity of movement between stages or statuses, track the duration of each stage as well as identify abnormal stage changes for any opportunity (for example, a backward stage change requires particular attention of sales managers).

3. Track Closed/Lost Opportunities

Opportunity Management in Salesforce allows tracking reasons of closed or lost opportunities with two custom fields – “Closed Lost Reason” and “Closed Lost Detail.” Filling in these fields should be mandatory for sales representatives, because this functionality allows the sales team to learn from past mistakes and prevent them in the future.

4. Switch on big deal e-mail alert

To enhance Opportunity Management in Salesforce, companies can use alerts that send an email notification for opportunities with large amounts. In particular, a company can set up custom threshold values for an opportunity amount or probability to pay closer attention to the most valuable deals or those that are about to close.

5. Enable Opportunity Update Reminders

Sales teams should strive hard to keep opportunities accurate and updated, because this is the basis for precise revenue forecasts. That is why companies can help sales representatives to keep their opportunities up-to-date by scheduling reminders to refresh opportunities status in Salesforce. Salesforce’s functionality allows creating weekly or monthly email reports with all open opportunities for the ongoing quarter.

6. Add and configure Similar Opportunities

Closing more deals in less time is one of the ultimate goals for any sales representative. So, companies that care about their sales team effectiveness can facilitate this process with Salesforce functionality. In particular, Salesforce CRM allows finding Closed/Won opportunities that are similar to an opportunity a sales rep is currently working on. With this possibility, sales teams can quickly search for successfully closed deals as well as access detailed information and best practices that lead to success and might help them close their current deals. Since this feature is not present in Salesforce out of the box, a company should manually add the Opportunities Related List to the Opportunity page layout.

7. Benefit from Opportunity Team functionality

Depending on how a company does business, it can create opportunity teams so that all members working on a deal can access the same record. In Salesforce, adding an Opportunity Team helps team members collaborate on a single opportunity and track its progress. Some companies can question the necessity of creating an Opportunity Team pointing that they already have Account Teams to deal with customers. Though both are used to relate particular employees to accounts or opportunities, companies usually create Account Teams to establish long-term relationships with customers, while an Opportunity Team is often a temporary group created for a particular deal. Salesforce also allows creating both custom and default opportunity teams. The latter can be useful for companies that typically work on deals with the same account manager and presales representative in a particular region.

8. Use Opportunity Splits

Once your company has created an Opportunity Team in Salesforce, it can enable the Opportunity Splits feature to motivate team members to complete the deal. Using opportunity Splits, a team owner can divide the opportunity among the team members, giving responsibility and credit where it’s due. A company can use either revenue or overlay splits for Opportunity Management in Salesforce.

1) Revenue Splits must equal 100% of the opportunity amount. Revenue splits allow you to allocate credit to sales reps who are directly involved in an opportunity and responsible for the revenue associated with it.

2) Unlike revenue splits, Overlay Splits are not limited by the opportunity amount. This can be any percentage of the actual opportunity totaling up to and even exceeding 100%. Overlay splits allow allocating credit to team members who are somewhat involved in the opportunity, but not directly responsible for the revenue it generates.

Salesforce helps to enhance Opportunity Management

There’s no silver bullet to increase the number of successfully closed opportunities. Still, software solutions, such as Salesforce, can help companies to achieve this goal. As seen from the examples above, Salesforce has a rich functionality to ensure effective opportunity management and ease the sales process for companies. As noticed by our Salesforce consulting experts, when applied in practice, this advice can bring substantial benefits in the opportunity management process.