3 Quick Salesforce Opportunity Upgrades

You either win or you learn. 

That’s how it works in real life for winners, and that’s how it should work in Salesforce. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality on the ground for most sales leaders and their teams.

Why? Because their Salesforce systems are not up to par with best practices. As a result, their sales reps are letting deals fall through the cracks, losing without learning, and wasting time on false opportunities.

Here are three simple best practices to change that: 

Best Practice 1: Track WHY deals are lost and leads are marked as unqualified. 

You can’t fix what you don’t understand.

By requiring reps to enter a loss reason before closing out a deal or to explain why they are marking a lead as unqualified, you can take the first step to improving win rates.

Once loss-reason tracking is in place, you can create reports to see what the most common reasons are and begin formulating a plan to address them. 

Best Practice 2: Add “Nurturing” and “Follow-Up in Future” steps to your process. 

There’s a big difference between a lead that is unqualified now, and a lead that is qualified but just not ready to move forward right now. 

If your reps are shoving them both into the same category, you’re missing out on the ability to auto-assign them follow up tasks for leads that may turn into opportunities in the future. Better yet, you can auto-route these leads to marketing in the meantime to keep them warm. 

Add a “Nurturing” step to your lead path if it’s not there already.

Likewise with Opportunities, there’s a distinction between deals that fell through for good and those that just need to be put on ice to revive another day. 

Add a “Follow Up in Future” step to your opportunity path to keep track of these valuable future potential deals. 

Best Practice 3: Raise the bar for your Lead Conversion Point.

The Conversion Point is the line in the sand you draw between qualified and unqualified leads. 

Instead of letting reps convert every lead with a pulse, require that they do more due diligence to determine that the lead at least has the ability to pay and interest in moving forward. 

While this may lower your lead conversion rate, it will make sure that your pipeline only has quality opportunities in it, resulting in a higher deal closing rate. 

Closed deals pay the bills, not qualified leads, so this is a good direction to move in. 

Bonus Best Practice: Create separate dashboards for managers and reps. 

If you’re looking at the same dashboard as your reps, chances are you’re both missing out on key information specific to your role. 

As a sales leader, your homepage dashboard should give you a quick high-level view of your teams performance. Ideally it provides insights to help you take the actions that will have the highest return on investment. 

Sales reps need to see how they are doing relative to their quota, how they compare to others on the team, and how their contributions are helping to move the needle for the business. 

This solution is as easy as building two sets of dashboards and assigning them by profile or role hierarchy.