Track your pipeline with a simple salesforce report and make your org proactive

As a salesforce admin, we are always in the hook to report insights and reports in salesforce which would enable our users to act quickly and predict on sales revenue and monitor problems.  Winter 14 created a new feature called historical tracking which would help to track your pipeline real time  and report on opportunities slipping the pipeline, deal amounts expanding or shrinking and monitor progress on the entire  pipeline. So the question is how to present data to our users which would help them to act at the right time and still win deals?

This can be done by a 3 point strategy.

1.  Make the pipeline change visible to the right audience by creating the historical trending report.

2.  Report on new opportunities falling in the pipeline.

3.  Warn on problems.

Make the pipeline change visible to the right audience by creating the historical trending report

To create the historical trending report, perform the following steps .

a. Enable historical tracking on your salesforce org for opportunities.

b. To watch Your Pipeline Change Over Time , Let’s say you want to know how the total value of your pipeline today compares with its value yesterday. Create a simple report to compare the two dates.

1. Create an opportunity history report.
a. On the Reports tab, click New Report.
b. Under Select Report Type > Opportunities, select Opportunities with Historical
Trending.
c. Click Create.
2. For Show, select All Opportunities.
Note that the default value in the Historical Date Field is Yesterday, and the Amount
(Historical) field shows yesterday’s date.

3. Click the down arrow in the headers of the Amount (Historical) and the Amount—Today
columns. Click Summarize This Field, then select Sum. The total amount appears at the bottom of each column.
4. Click the down arrow in the header of the Amount column and select Show Changes.
5. Click Run Report.
6. In the Change column, observe the difference between the total value of the Amount
(Historical) column and that of the Amount–Today column.
Tip: You can see changes at a glance by looking for values that are colored green or
red.
You have created a simple historical trending report that can help you analyze your pipeline’s behavior easily.

2.Report on new opportunities falling in the pipeline

Create automated triggers which would look for close date which has been modified and falls in the current quarter and if the close date falls in the current quarter, send a notification to the sales team to act on the opportunity. This would help to act the sales rep to leave no money on the table.

3. Warn on problems.

If the close date is pushed beyond the current quarter or deal amount is shrunk, a notification trigger should send a chatter post or alert to the sales team to act on the opportunity . This would help the sales team to prevent losing opportunities and win them.

Using the 3 step approach, you can make your salesforce reports more proactive, make your users to act on immediately and prevent problems on the forecasts. Please feel free to post your comments and you can always send me an email to buyan47@gmail.com for any further questions. Check the below report for reference.

 

PipelineChangeRpt

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Author: buyan47

Hi there! My name is Buyan Thyagarajan. I am a Salesforce consultant specializing in Higher Education, Manufacturing and Marketing Automation. My blogs will help you to maximize your Salesforce CRM investments, prevent problems beforehand and make the right decisions. If you need to talk to me right away, you can email me at buyan47@gmail.com or call me at 302-438-4097

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