Mastering the Salesforce Opportunity List View

This resource library provides Sales Leaders with the best ways to utilize Salesforce to help run your sales team or teams. This blog is about leveraging one of the more powerful tools in Salesforce Lightning.

As a Sales Manager, one of your primary objectives is to be on top of your team's sales pipeline (or funnel), collectively and each seller's current open Opportunities.

There are several ways to do this in Salesforce with Dashboards, Reports, and Lists. But the Salesforce Lightning Kanban Board is one of the simplest. This is one of the best features of Salesforce Lightning Lightning.

The Kanban Board is, in fact, a List View. But rather than presented in the traditional "table" view (think an Excel spreadsheet with rows and columns), the Opportunity records are displayed in a far more visually identifiable manner.

Fans of Six Sigma or Project Managers will be all too familiar with Kanban Boards. Each Opportunity record is displayed on a separate 'card' or 'tile'; those cards or tiles are arranged in columns. The columns can be grouped in many ways, but for Opportunities, the clear choice is the Opportunity Stage.

One of the most overlooked aspects of Salesforce is giving Sales Leaders the right tools to manage their teams — like the Opportunity Kanban Board. If your sales leaders are struggling with pipeline visibility, consider P3 Performance, a consulting firm that specializes in Salesforce Adoption for Sales Teams.

Building Your Sales Manager Kanban Boards

As a Sales Manager, we feel it's essential to have a series of Kanban Boards – one for each sales team member, plus one additional board for the entire team. (If you have seven direct reports, you would ultimately have eight complete Kanban Boards). Our training and adoption programs at P3 Performance cover this in detail in our Reporting for Manager classes.

So, this first step requires a little awareness of how List Views work and how to create them, so we'll skip over some basics. There's a great Trailhead unit and Video Tutorial for those wanting more information.

Start by creating a new List View. (You can clone an existing list as well, but this is pretty straightforward and requires just enough customization that starting from scratch makes more sense.)

Name your List View, and My Team's Open Opportunities (or something meaningful to you). If your Admin has set up Salesforce properly, you should only be able to select the first option, and Only I Can See This List View. If that sounds counterintuitive – and your whole team should be able to see this List, then schedule a call with us, and we'll explain why.

What you want to do next is set the owner filter to My Team's Opportunities. Note that your Admin has set up the Role Hierarchy in the background for this Filter to work correctly. You'll need to use All Opportunities and add a Filter for Owner if they haven't. Instructions for this appear below.

The next set of filters is a little more complex, but trust us, they are well worth the (small) effort. Firstly, let's explain the thinking behind what we're about to show you.

So, what have you done for me lately?

The idea is that the Team Kanban Board will show you how many Open Opportunities your team manages and a defined selection of Closed Won Opportunities. For instance, likely, you don't care about Opportunities that were won last year. That's a case of "been there, done that" or "So, what have you done for me lately?" You might not even be concerned with Opportunities won last quarter or the previous month. It all depends on how long your typical sales cycles are. You need to ask yourself – do I want to see my team's closed won opportunities for just the current month, the current quarter, or the entire calendar year? Once you've figured that out, you can create the following three filters.

We'll outline the filters here without going into too much explanation as to why they work. If you're curious, drop us at info@salesforcetraining.com, and we'll gladly explain.

Select Add Filter from the filter menu and enter the following:

Field = Closed
Operator = equals
Value = False (which is the box already highlighted).

Click Done and then select Add Filter, and enter the following:

Field = Closed
Operator = equals
Value = True (the other option)

Click Done and then select Add Filter, and enter the following:

Field = Close Date
Operator = equals
Value = this month (or this quarter, or this year). You need to write this out as "this month" (without the quotes).

Click Done.

Now, there's one more item to take care of.

Fans of Boolean logic will immediately recognize that this list view will generate precisely zero results. You can't have two conflicting filters: Closed = False and Closed = True. No Opportunity would ever fulfill those conditions. So, we need to add Filter Logic. Select that option, and then what you need to do is change the existing text from

1 AND 2 AND 3

To

1 OR (2 AND 3)

Make that change, click Save, and presto, you have a List View of all your team's Open Opportunities and a subset of their Closed Opportunities.

Set up Your Team Kanban Board

OK, so we're most of the way there. Next, we must configure the individual cards to capture the most relevant information about the Opportunities. This will differ slightly between the Team Kanban Board and the Individual Rep Kanban Boards.

Select the Gear or 'Cog' icon again (the same one you used to create your new List View), and now select

Select Fields to Display

Find Stage from the List of Visible Fields (it should be in the third spot) and move it down two places to the 5th spot. (if that seems arbitrary, don't worry – it'll make sense soon). Next, you can remove Opportunity Owner Alias by moving it to the List of Available Fields using the left-facing arrow (or carat). You want to replace this with the field Owner Full Name from the Available Fields box. Bring this over using the right-facing arrow and then move it into the top four spots. You'll need to sacrifice one of the top 4 fields, and we suggest moving Account Name out of the Top 4. If your sales team uses the standard Opportunity naming convention properly, then the Account Name is at the start of each Opportunity name.

So, your List of fields should include the following:

Opportunity Name
Stage
Close Date
Owner Full Name

in the Top 4 fields. Now, click Save.

At last, you can select the Shower Head icon (the one beside the cog that looks like a shower head or a Chart) and choose Kanban.

And voila! There you go. Your Team's Open Opportunity pipeline with Closed Won deals for the period (month, quarter or year) all in Kanban mode.

You'll likely want to 'pin' this Kanban Board to the Opportunities tab so that you'll see this one displayed each time (and not Recently Viewed).

You'll probably want to set up Kanbans for each rep from here. This is very straightforward to do with a couple of simple steps. If you need help with that exercise, give us a shout; we'll gladly walk you through it.

Limitations of the Kanban Board

So, while Kanban Boards are great, they're not perfect. Like most things, plenty of great things about Kanban Boards come with several limitations.

One of the limits is that the card, or tile, can only hold 4 fields. Hence, the reason it's important to select those four fields wisely. That's why we like Opportunity Name, Close Date, Amount and either Opportunity Owner (for the Team Board) or another selected field that you find helpful for the individual boards.

The other limitation is that the Kanban Board will display up to 200 records. This should easily be enough for each one of your individual seller's Kanbans, but for the Team Kanban Board, depending on the size of your team and the number of Opportunities each seller might have, this may exceed the 200 Opportunity display limit. In that case, you'll need to revert to the traditional table list view.

But these limitations are minor compared with the benefits a Sales Manager will get from utilizing this incredibly innovative tool.

P3 Performance is a professional training firm with trainers in the UK, Canada and the US specializing in helping companies and their sales teams get the most out of Salesforce. Got questions about how Salesforce works? Let's grab 30 minutes and have a look.