From all the new capabilities Sales Cloud received in Release 11, the Deal Calendar is one of my favorites! Let me first tell you all about it and then show you how little it takes to make one.
What a deal calendar is
Imagine you are working with a team of people on an account or an opportunity. Coordinating all meetings or calls between the team and the customer might get complicated. You do not want too many interactions with your customer too close to one another right? It might be better to spread them out a little. That is exactly what a deal calendar is all about.
A deal calendar allows you to see all activities against an account or an opportunity from anyone working on the account or opportunity in a traditional calendar view. The screenshot of the calendar below shows activities of 3 different salesreps working together on one specific opportunity.
Some more things to know are:
- This weekly view can be interesting when the sales process heats up in the last few weeks of a sales cycle, but other traditional calendar views like a monthly or just a plain list view are available too.
- If a fourth account team member would schedule a call with the same customer, his call would automatically appear in the calendar and his name would be added to the list of people involved too.
- Clicking on the image of a user will hide or show activities in the deal calendar for that particular user.
- A deal calendar for an account will show all activities against that account whether they are created against an opportunity or not. Key account managers will love this !
- Using the same paradigm, sales cloud users can also choose to just make a calendar where activities of other selected users are shown. But off course only those activities are shown that the user would have been able to see elsewhere in Sales Cloud.
How to make a deal calendar
Deal calendars are extremely easy to make. All it takes to make one is to choose the type of deal calendar you want to make, and specify the account or opportunity you want to see. That is all ! Existing activities ins Sales Cloud as show up immediately as will new activities from then on.
There is an extra step for team calendars. You off course need to specify which other users you want to include in your team calendar.
