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A major advantage of using Salesforce CRM is that you’ll gain visibility into your organization’s
pipeline—so your managers can accurately predict future revenues based on all deals in progress. They can
also track any individual deal, to know when to step in to help a
deal along and guide the rep, as necessary.
Abstract
To take advantage of these benefits, your sales organization Take control of your pipeline and your deals by
needs a disciplined sales process that uses the opportunities making the most of the opportunity object in
Salesforce CRM. Align your sales process with
object in Salesforce CRM. The process itself is simple; Salesforce CRM—and make your reps more
however, it has to be understood by everyone in the organization productive as a result.
and enforced by management. By Jason Garoutte
This document covers the steps for getting started with
opportunities and how to use related features to make your reps more productive:
1. Define your sales stages
2. Establish naming conventions
3. Make key fields mandatory
4. Run your forecast meetings with the pipeline report
5. Create “big deal” alerts
6. Use activities and email templates
7. Use the similar opportunities feature
8. Use Chatter to follow specific opportunities
If you don’t yet have an explicit process, use the default stages in Salesforce CRM, as shown in the
illustration below. To make sure your stages fit your business, ask your administrator to customize each
stage with a relevant name. Whether you use the default stages or customize them to fit your business, your
entire sales organization should understand what each stage means. So write your stage definitions on a
cheat sheet, spend 30 minutes training your reps, and enforce those definitions every chance you get.
BEST PRACTICE 2
8 steps to unlocking your pipeline with opportunities
If you’re just getting started with reports, check out the Salesforce CRM pre-defined reports. At
salesforce.com, we also customize reports grouped first by fiscal period and then by stage, so our sales
managers can discuss which deals are expected to close in each of the coming months.
To get the predefined pipeline report: Go to the report folder called Opportunity Reports and choose the
Opportunity Pipeline report. That report shows the entire open pipeline, sorted by stage and probability.
BEST PRACTICE 3
8 steps to unlocking your pipeline with opportunities
Ask your administrator to turn on Chatter by clicking Setup and navigating to AppSetup/Customize/Chatter.
Enabling Chatter also activates the Salesforce user interface, which is not supported by Internet Explorer 6.
For more information on using Chatter, go to the Chatter Getting Started page. For information about how
we use Chatter, see the Best Practice document “How salesforce.com uses Chatter.”
BP_Opportunities_2010-08-19