Salesforce Opportunity Stages Explained With Best Practice Recommendations
July 10, 2024
Knowing a potential customer’s position in your sales pipeline is critical for determining how to approach them and guide them to the next step of the sales cycle. But what’s an easier way to do that?
Enter: The opportunity stages feature in Salesforce.
Salesforce opportunity stages provide a clear understanding of each lead’s place in your sales process, their probability of progressing in the pipeline, and what they need to move on to the next step. When used strategically, opportunity stages can help you engage leads and optimize your overarching sales process.
Understanding Salesforce Opportunity Stages
Salesforce has 10 built-in opportunity stages that reflect common steps in the sales pipeline:
- Prospecting: Gather all potential leads the sales team may want to explore
- Qualification: Determining if prospects align with your customer profile
- Needs analysis: Conduct a needs analysis on qualified prospects to gather information you can use to inform your sales strategy
- Value proposition: Outlining how your offerings can provide value by resolving customer problems
- Decision makers: Identify the individuals in charge of purchasing decisions for your lead
- Perception analysis: Learning how your prospects feel about your product and determining what information or support they need to proceed with a deal
- Proposal/price quote: Generating and pitching your proposal to the lead
- Negotiation/review: Reaching an agreement with customers about the terms of your deal
- Closed won: Identifying prospects that have fully converted to customers
- Closed lost: Identifying prospects that are no longer interested in your offerings
Your organization’s parameters for moving a prospect into each stage may vary—for example, qualified customers can look very different from business to business. So, when you select the relevant stages for your organization, clarify the criteria for your specific leads.
Identifying which stages are relevant to your business and tracking prospect movement through each stage gives you valuable information about the health of your sales pipeline. For instance, you can use your opportunity stage data to identify the stage with the fewest conversions, eliminate sales roadblocks, and streamline your sales process.
Best Practices for Managing Opportunity Stages
Several best practices can help you achieve better results when managing opportunity stages in Salesforce.
First, using clear and direct labels for each stage is vital to ensure everyone on your team understands what each stage means. Additionally, you should determine the specific criteria for entering and exiting each stage to ensure consistency across the board.
Your team should also be trained on the specific actions they should take for prospects in each stage to effectively move them through the pipeline.
Finally, deploying automation tools to track lead activity and update opportunity stages can help you stay on top of your pipeline and identify potential issues or bottlenecks.
Leveraging Salesforce Features for Opportunity Management
Salesforce includes rich features that you can use to optimize your opportunity management—and the possibilities are vast:
- Set up your leads to automatically advance to the next stage when they complete certain actions
- Assign contact roles to better understand who is involved at each stage of an opportunity
- Evaluate your pipeline with a dashboard that tracks KPIs
- Generate opportunity reports to explore in-depth information about your opportunity accounts
Keep in mind that sales tracking is critical for helping you identify inefficiencies, forecast future sales, and develop strategies for speeding up your sales cycle.
Integrating Operatus With Salesforce for Enhanced Visibility
Using opportunity stages to guide your sales pipeline management is just one of the many ways you can leverage Salesforce to improve customer engagement and enhance sales processes. Another way is to partner with a RevOps and Salesforce specialist like Operatus.
As a well-rounded RevOps team, Operatus combines strategy and execution to help you extract greater value from your Salesforce CRM, giving you more control over your sales ecosystem.
Here’s an example of what that looks like in practice: When the team at Exclaimer sought to upgrade their CRM to Salesforce, specialists at Operatus successfully guided their implementation based on their project goals and existing sales processes.
The Operatus team also equipped Exclaimer with centralized dashboards for KPI management and marketing ROI measurement tools, providing their reps with the insights they needed to guide leads through the sales pipeline more efficiently.
Common Challenges and Solutions
Despite the benefits of opportunity stages, there is a catch—they’re only effective when well-designed.
Fortunately, by understanding common pitfalls, you can learn how to best prevent them:
- Lack of alignment: Your opportunity stages should accurately reflect your sales process. To that end, be sure to update the default stages with customized information that’s tailored to your real-world efforts.
- Too many stages: Breaking down your sales pipeline into too many opportunity stages can clutter your opportunity visualization and make it harder to see the big picture. Consolidate and combine similar stages to create functional categories that hone in on the insights you’re seeking.
- Outdated categorization: Your sales reps need to accurately categorize each lead and update their status as they progress through the pipeline. Train your team to regularly make updates and set up automated tools to streamline the process.
Along with taking these preventative steps, you can leverage Operatus CRM optimization to get more out of Salesforce features like opportunity stages.
Contact the Operatus team today to explore how their Salesforce implementation expertise can support sales process improvement for your business.
