Understanding how to curate a sales process is a key skill for any Salesforce Consultant. Below are some key components for configuring an efficient process for either a new sales cloud implementation or a new business unit.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Albert Einstein
Discovery: Current Process
- It is important to have a meeting with the sales managers, sales reps, and stakeholders.
- Ask the following questions to gain insights to help shape your sales process solution.
- Walk me through your sales process. What is the first step on a new sale?
- Do you seek face to face meetings or phone calls to establish the customer’s needs?
- Is your sales cycle quick or long?
- Is your sales cycle low or high touch?
- Do you create or generate a quote for customer Signature?
- At what point do you consider a sale finalized?
- Here are some fictional answers that we can review for designing a sales process.
- The sales rep first creates an opportunity record and gives a customer a call to schedule an on-site meeting.
- The sales rep has a quick sales cycle with customers as usually a customer signs a contract during the first meeting or they disqualify. The sales rep creates a contract during the meeting with the customer.
- Sales reps consider the sale completed once the customer signs the contract.
Alan Perlis
“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.”
Solution: Sales Stages
Once you have a good list of answered questions you are ready to start putting together a recommended sales process. Within sales cloud you will build out a sales process utilizing the following components.
- Opportunity record types
- Record types allow for different categorization of sales processes, pick list values, page layouts, and report filtering. I recommend utilizing record types when a customer has multiple uniques sales processes.
- Sales process
- A sales process is comprised of a list of sales stages and also assigned record type. Based on the above customer answers I would recommend the following sales stages. It is important to not over engineer stages to make the process to complex as it will hurt user adoption and water down the sales pipeline
- Sales stages
- New
- Qualification
- Contracting
- Signed (Closed Won)
- Closed lost
- Sales path
- A path is the visual representation of the sales stages on an opportunity. The sales path runs across the top of the opportunity record and can also provide helpful text for each stage via the guidance for success. below are some examples of guidance for success for each stage.
- New
- “Remember to update the next step and relate a primary contact to the opportunity”
- Qualification
- “Set the opportunity type and log meeting notes”
- Contracting
- “Create the contract, update amount and contract expiration date.”
- Signed
- “Enter signed date and set start date for onboarding.”
- New
- A path is the visual representation of the sales stages on an opportunity. The sales path runs across the top of the opportunity record and can also provide helpful text for each stage via the guidance for success. below are some examples of guidance for success for each stage.
Review
Once you have build out the sales process it is time to demo the configuration with your customer. To ensure you are maximizing the impact of the presentation I recommend you spending some time creating a sales story or day in a life demo.
Creating demo records will be important and these records should be aligned with a real lif scenario. Walk the customer through the sales process and on each stage relay the real world steps the sales reps take.
Gather any feedback from the review demo and ensure to go back and adjust the sales stages if needed. In conclusion the sales cloud sales process is a crucial component of any Salesforce implementation but by keeping it simple and intuitive you can align it for success!
SalesforceThink 
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