Opportunities are driven through a process which we call in Sales Cloud the ‘Sales Method’. Multiple types of sales methods can be defined in Sales Cloud, each with a defining a different opportunity life cycle. Throughout the process, opportunities move on from sales stage to sales stage until the opportunity finally is closed and hopefully won.
In order to assist salesreps in each of the sales stages, Sales Cloud has a feature called ‘Sales Coach’ which helps the salesreps in each of the sales stages to learn from best practices in order to get to the next stage as quickly as possible.
Configuring the Sales Coach
Here is how the sales coach can be configured
- log on to sales cloud as an administrator
- choose ‘Setup and Maintenance’ from the navigator
- search for name ‘sales method’
- drill into the sales method for which you want to configure the sales coach
- drill into the sales stage for which you want to configure the sales coach
Process Steps (shown as action items in the example above)
Process steps are nothing more than textual recommendations of the types of things to do during the sales stage. These have titles as shown in the sales coach example in the image above, but using a rich-text-editor, detailed information can be added to provide as much information as possible.
Additional Required Fields
Defining additional required fields for a sales stage will make optional fields mandatory once opportunities reach this stage. This way salesreps can document their opportunities step by step and have the layout of the screen build up more and more, allowing for more detailed information as we move through the opportunity process.
Recommended Documents
Documents that might be of interest to the salesrep who has opportunities in this sales stage can be made available here. These can be documents that can be shared with the customer, or documents that were added for the sales teams only.
Activity Templates
When activities are linked to the sales coach, as soon as opportunities get to the stage for which activities were defined, they are added to the activities for the opportunity.
Assessment Templates
Opportunity assessments allow sales organization to organize assessments to evaluate opportunities in a structured way instead of evaluating opportunities based on gut feelings. Assessments should happen regularly, especially when sales cycles last a long time, since conditions under which opportunities were chosen to pursue can change over time.
When assessments are linked to the sales coach, as soon as opportunities get to the stage for which assessments were defined, they are added to the assessments for the opportunity.
More configuration options
To finish off the configuration of an opportunity stage definition, we can use the App Composer to add more configured dependencies between what salesreps can do and the sales stage of their opportunities:
- Use the object workflow to send out email notifications when an opportunity reaches a certain sales stage. Extra conditions can be added e.g. send email only for opportunities above a certain size, or with close date within the current quarter
- Buttons, subtabs and optional fields can be defined per sales stage by defining a ‘dynamic layout’ for each of the opportunity sales stages on the opportunity detail screen
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