If you are working for a technology company selling Saas offerings and have a lot of opportunities for renewals, and extensions, the challenge of notifying sales teams on deals and making them update the opportunities before your quarter could be a daunting task. This can become more challenging if you have multiple products with different license types and each license type has its own expiration dates for renewal. Even though account teams might have their own pulse on the renewals and work very closely with customers, there are situations where the sales team forgets to update the opportunities at the right time or forget to notify customers during budget time frames which might lead to a loss in renewals. So the question is how do we proactively monitor these opportunities and notify the sales team to act on them?

Solution

Here is my knowledge article in Salesforce that will help you provide a quick solution to it. The solution is based on a new date field called expiration date which can be set based on your product’s renewal date, potential client budget date, and any critical date field which will help to notify the sales team to take action. Typically Saas companies have a separate opportunity record type or field to identify renewal opportunities. So for renewal opportunities, you can create a process where the expiration date has to be updated by the sales teams before they move the stage closer to closed won. Once the expiration date is set, scheduled flows will keep monitoring the opportunity.

Proactively Monitoring for Action

Email alerts or other kinds of alerts can be sent to the sales team two weeks before the expiration date to let them act on the opportunity. They can also update the opportunity expiration date if needed if they see any customer delays in decisions. The solution can also be expanded to flag the opportunity as critical if the expiration date expires which can be sent to the sales leadership to decide on the next steps. Leveraging the power of automation in salesforce, you can increase the revenue of your company easily on renewals and prevent any losses from your product renewals.

Here are things to consider that you can do to expand the solution to your needs.

a. Leveraging the Salesforce path, you can display the critical expiration date to be updated by the sales team on critical stages of your opportunity process.

b. Automation on change in expiration dates can be done to forecasting fields that will help sales leadership to act on opportunities and help to forecast revenue.

c. This can also be set as a journey with your marketing automation tool where a sequence of multiple channel messages to your sales team in the form of text, and email messages can be sent to have the team act on the opportunities immediately.

d. For product renewals that are automatically done like the salesforce platform and may not need sales team interventions, opportunities can be closed automatically by leveraging automation saving your sales team valuable time on not keeping up with those opportunities.

If you want to know more about the solutions, please click here to learn more about the knowledge article. Feel free to post your comments below or email me at buyan@eigenx.com for further information.