Your Complete Guide to Opportunity Stages in Salesforce

While some companies implement a ‘Reasons Lost’ picklist field, I’m not a fan because the picklist field typically includes a value such as ‘Pricing’ – and that accounts for most reasons entered by salespeople. Yet often, price is not the real reason deals are lost; imperfections in the discovery process, or failure to engage with all the relevant stakeholders, are more significant factors. 

If you want to understand how to improve your win rates, it’s better to conduct a small number of qualitative interviews with prospects that have rejected your proposals. You’ll likely get a deeper understanding and identify more actionable steps.

When sales reps skip opportunity stages, sales leaders lose an accurate picture of the sales pipeline and cannot rely on accurate sales forecasts. Skipping opportunity stages also results in sandbagging; in other words, successfully closing deals out of the blue, often at the end of the month, and appearing to be a hero. 

Bear in mind that a critical cause of reps skipping stages in some companies is overzealous sales leadership. Reps hide deals until they are confident that an opportunity is likely to be won, and then the opportunity quickly progresses to the final stages. 

There are several steps you can take to prevent reps from skipping opportunity stages on deals: 

• Get the right balance between rigor in managing the sales pipeline and overzealousness that results in reps hiding deals. 

• Regularly review pipeline coverage to ensure that each salesperson has an appropriate mix of short-, medium-, and long-term opportunities. 

• Use field history tracking on opportunities to identify individual cases of stage skipping when you suspect it may be happening. 

• Ensure sales reps understand the importance and reasons for progressively moving deals through the opportunity stages in line with the customer buying process.

An excellent way to identify stalled or at-risk deals by opportunity stage is to use the pipeline quality metrics in the GSP Target Tracker Salesforce app. For example, metrics in these Salesforce apps include the number of days since the last stage change, the number of days open, and the number of month-changes to the Close Date. 

The metric of # Close Date Month changes is a particularly valuable pipeline quality metric because it allows you to report on opportunities with slipping deals.

You can implement different opportunity stages for various types of sales deals by using record types on opportunities. For example, when salespeople create an opportunity for an existing customer, the stages will automatically align with the type of opportunity.  

However, I recommend you exercise caution. Introducing opportunity record types and variable sales stages increases your maintenance overhead. It also makes reporting on pipeline coverage more complex. 

I recommend having different opportunity stages for new vs existing customer deals only if the two processes are entirely different.

In Salesforce, each opportunity stage has a predefined forecast category. You can view this relationship by looking at the configuration area of the opportunity stage field. There is also the flexibility to change the forecast category associated with each opportunity stage.

To enable the Path for opportunity stages: 

• Go to Setup. 

• Search for Path in the Quick Find box and select Path Settings. 

• Click Edit against the Path for the opportunity object. 

• Select Next, then enter text and comments for each opportunity stage under 'Guidance for Success.' 

• Optionally, add fields within the Path for data that salespeople must enter at each stage in the sales process. 

• Save and Activate the Path.

To clean up and simplify a stage list that has too many opportunity stages, replace and deactivate stages that are no longer required. In Salesforce: 

• Go to setup, object manager, opportunity. 

• Select Fields & Relationships then Stage. 

• Click New to create new opportunity stages. 

• Use the Replace function to transfer opportunities from a stage you intend to deactivate to another opportunity stage. 

• Finally, deactivate any opportunity stages that are no longer required. 

I recommend deactivating dormant stages rather than deleting them to preserve opportunity history for reporting purposes.

Some companies use ‘Leads’ rather than ‘Opportunities’ in Salesforce for early-stage deals. That’s okay if it’s a brand-new inquiry from a previously unknown prospect. However, if your business has already engaged with the prospect, they will already be an ‘Account’, against which you should create an opportunity. 

Moreover, using opportunities rather than leads, even during the early qualification process, enables you to collect a more comprehensive set of discovery-type information about the potential sales deal.