How To Think Like A Salesforce Admin

Every person that works in the Salesforce industry knows the importance of how sales uses opportunities. After all, sales is the lifeblood of all companies, and the software they use to manage these sales is critical. If the opportunities are not managed correctly in their stages, all hell breaks loose.

Here’s what er have for you today:

• The importance of setting up opportunity stages correctly

• Use case of what happens when stages are setup incorrectly and how to ask the needed questions as an admin to help with opportunity setups.

• Memes to brighten your day.

When landing a role as a Salesforce Admin or Consultant, you may have clients who are either setting up their Salesforce instance for the first time or have it set up but want help improving their current setup because it is not optimal. One area where many companies can improve is their opportunity stage setup. Salesforce automatically comes with preconfigured stages, but every company is unique, and the generic stages are not a one-size-fits-all solution.

When deciding on the opportunity stages, it is critical to get the sales team's input to understand their sales lifecycle. After consulting with them and understanding their process, define what needs to happen in each stage of their sales process, such as what information needs to be gathered before moving to the next step.

Less Is More

Once you have gathered this information, you can start coming up with the stage names and, in each stage, input a field and relationship to collect the needed information. It’s important to remember that less is more—try to keep the stages as simple as possible. If there are too many stages or they are too complex, new sales and operations teams will easily get overwhelmed.

Disaster Case

Now that you understand how to properly form opportunity stages, it’s important to understand what can happen if stages are not set up correctly. Hundreds of sales occur daily, and if the opportunity stages and relationships are a mess, sales can drastically drop. Realistically, for sales, if a customer does not buy on the first interaction, the chances of the sale can drop by 50%. If the salesperson cannot complete a sale due to Salesforce errors or if the stages are not in the correct order, it will majorly affect your company’s bottom line. The sales VPs and Board Members will notice and demand improvements, causing you to have to redo the opportunity stages. If you are the one who originally set them up incorrectly, they can start to easily lose faith in your abilities.

Sales Can Be Your Number One Supporter

When the Sales department and Salesforce Admins have an open line of communication they can be your number one supporters. If you take them into consideration they can keep making sales. And your whole company will benefit from a simple and effective Salesforce setup. Avoid a Salesforce apocalypse take the time to understand the sales and operations teams daily needs. To keep money flowing in your company’s org.