Launchpad Lesson 14 - Opportunity Setup

Welcome back. This lesson is all about the opportunity object, my favorite item in all of Salesforce. It is one of the most important objects in Sales Cloud and is the primary object used to track deals and the revenue that your sales team is generating.

For sales teams, this is the place where everything happens. Your team's ability to utilize opportunities correctly is the key to getting real value out of Salesforce, as it will allow you to see what the team is working on and what you can reasonably expect in terms of revenue forecasts.

Opportunities represent the potential future revenue from your sales team's activities. Let's look at the four key standard fields on the opportunity object that are critical to determining the health of your team's pipeline.

The opportunity amount. This field is the anticipated revenue that your company stands to gain from this deal. Very simply, if Rocket Shop has a deal on the table to sell Rocket Parts for $100,000, the Amount field would hold $100,000.

The opportunity stage. This field relates directly to the steps of your company's sales process. Our suggestion is always to strive for simplicity and aim for fewer steps, not more. Salesforce gives you a standard process, but we always recommend that each company sets up its own.

Close date. Initially, this is an estimate from the sales rep as to when they think, or perhaps hope, that they are going to get the deal done. It usually changes over time, as prospects and customers don't always want to decide as quickly as we would like them to. It's important that the salesperson ensures that the date is always in the future and not in the past.

Probability. This is the percentage chance of the deal closing. It is typically updated automatically to a preset value when the stages change, but we are big proponents of leaving it as an editable field and encouraging your salespeople to adjust the amount based on their true perception about the likelihood of winning the deal.

While we've spent a lot of time covering how to set up your leads, accounts, and contacts, the reality is the opportunity object is of vital importance for your sales team. This is the lifeblood of Salesforce, and this is where your salespeople should be spending most of their time in Salesforce, keeping their pipeline up to date.

Let's have a look at Salesforce now and show you how to set up the opportunity object.

The first thing to do is determine our sales stages. Let's go into Setup, select the Object Manager, select Opportunity, and then Fields & Relationships.

No doubt this is becoming pretty familiar by now. All right, find Stage. Then go down to your opportunity stages and picklist values.

Now, these are pretty good and generally represent a pretty standard sales cycle. You could certainly do worse than to use these. We'd suggest involving your sales team and mapping out what your own company sales stages are.

At Rocket Shop, we like these, but we've always called our first stage, where we train our salespeople to ask great questions, the Discovery phase. So, because that's the term our salespeople use, we'll deactivate Qualification and create a new stage called Discovery.

Click New and call it Discovery.

Now, every stage needs a type, which is either Open, Closed Won, or Closed Lost. This is clearly Open. It needs a probability, and in our case, when we're at the Discovery stage, we're successful at closing the deal about 25% of the time.

Lastly, we need a forecast category. We're not covering forecasts in this course, so just leave this as Pipeline, and you can skip the description.

At Rocket Shop, our prospects are much more inclined to buy after a product demo, which occurs after the Needs Analysis. So, let's add that too, in the same way as we did for Discovery.

We'll make the probability 70%.

Now we want to reorder these and put Discovery first, and Product Demo after Needs Analysis and before Proposal.

Now, remember in the Lead setup lesson how we created a custom field for Primary Product Interest: either Rocket Ships, Rocket Parts, or Rocket Fuel. We didn't add it to the Account object in the Account setup lesson because it really relates more to an opportunity than it does an account.

So now we're going to add the custom field for Primary Product Interest to the Opportunity object. You should know how to do this.

Fields & Relationships. New Field. Picklist. Call it Primary Product Interest.

Select Enter Values and type Rocket Ships, Rocket Parts, and Rocket Fuel on separate lines.

Leave these boxes as they are. Add help text. Click Next.

Make it visible and editable to anyone. Select Opportunity Layout and click Save.

Another key concept on opportunities is a specific item on the related list called Contact Roles. Here's an example.

Let's say that we're working on this opportunity at Space Shuttle Supply to sell them power boosters, and Scotty is in the role of Technical Buyer. So, we'll add his contact role.

Find Contact Roles on the related lists. Click the dropdown arrow. Select Add Contact Roles. Select Scotty. Click Next.

In the Role picklist, select Technical Buyer. Let's make Scotty the primary contact as well.

Now, at Rocket Shop, we know that we're always more successful when the aeronautical engineer from the buyer's side is present at our demo. So, let's add that role to the opportunity contact roles. Here's how.

From the Object Manager, find Opportunity Contact Role and select it. Click Fields & Relationships. Select Role and scroll down to Opportunity Contact Role picklist values.

Recognize these? They're the same as the Account Contact Relationship roles, but they're used for a different purpose.

Now, we're just going to replace Evaluator with Aeronautical Engineer, who really is the evaluator for our customers. This just makes it more realistic for our salespeople to use their own terminology.

Now, while you don't need to change the API name, we've always believed, for consistency, that it's a good idea anyway. Remember to put in the underscore, click Save, and you're done.

Okay, just two more things to do: adjust your page layout and modify the Lightning record page.

We actually did the majority of the opportunity page layout back in the lesson on page layouts. But we should do one more thing, and that's move the Primary Product Interest field.

So, go back to the Object Manager for the Opportunity. Select Page Layouts and then Opportunity Layout.

Let's move Primary Product Interest into the Sales Call Discovery section, where it really belongs.

Now let's look at an actual opportunity record to see if it looks the way we want. Yep, it sure does.

So now the last thing for us to do is to change the Lightning pages. We want to do the same as we did for our lead—namely, Details and Related on the left-hand side, and Activity and Chatter on the right.

From an opportunity record, select Edit Page from the Setup cog. If you don't have an opportunity, either create one or follow the same steps we walked through in the Lead setup lesson.

From the large component, make Details the default.

Delete the Activity and Chatter tabs, and add a Related tab. Put it after Details.

Next, click the Related tab and bring over the Related List Quick Links and Related Lists components, and stack them like this.

Now, set the tabs on the right to Activity and Chatter, respectively, and make sure Activity is the default.

Get rid of this Related Lists component with the little trash can.

Now click the Activity tab and go back to the component list. Drag over Activities and place it in the Add Components Here box.

Then do the same thing with the Chatter tab.

Click Save. Activation. Assign as the Org Default.

Leave the next step as Desktop. Click Next and click Save.

Leave the Page Builder with the Back button on the top left. Now let's go in and see how it looks.

Voila! Just the way that you wanted.

Okay, how are you feeling? You've got all four sales objects customized and ready to roll. Man, that was a ton, wasn't it?

The last thing I want to talk about is a standard field on the Opportunity object called Next Step.

Now, you would think a field called Next Step on an opportunity record makes a lot of sense, right? But it's never been one that I've promoted. Here's why.

We're going to be covering activities in a couple of lessons ahead. And, for my money, using activities to track what you've done and what you're going to do, like your next step, is a far better approach.

I'll explain more when we get to that lesson. So, for now, you can leave Next Step on the Opportunity object. If you ever decide to take it off, you certainly know how.

Next up, a lesson on the Sales Path. See you there.