Salesforce Pipeline Inspection

Pipeline Inspection probably is an upgrade of the list view, but just for the Opportunity object. Before we discuss further Pipeline Inspection, let's see what is required to access Pipeline Inspection.

To access Pipeline Inspection, you need to have Pipeline Inspection User permission, which is available under the Pipeline Inspection Included permission set. You will have this Pipeline Inspection license if you use Unlimited or Performance edition. In short, you must be on Unlimited or Performance edition, then assign a permission set that has Pipeline Inspection User permission enabled.

"Pipeline Inspection gives sales teams a consolidated view of pipeline metrics, opportunities, week-to-week changes, AI-driven insights, close date predictions, and activity information. With this intelligence, sales teams can focus on the most important opportunities and forecast revenue more accurately." quote from salesforce article. Those features are great for reps and their manager to manage their pipeline.

Period

Starting from the top, you can select opportunity closing: This Week, This Month, This  Quarter, Next Week, Next Month, Next Quarter, or Custom.

For
Then, you can select opportunities owned by: Me, My Team (people under me in the role hierarchy), My Opportunity Teams (opportunities where I am added to the Opportunity team), and every user below me under the role hierarchy, users available here:

• Active users
• Not assigned with Chatter profiles
• Include Partner Community users, for internal users', the name end with 's Teams, such as John Smith's Teams, while partner community users only have the full name. There is no way to hide partner community users from the dropdown, so vote for this idea. When selecting an internal user, because it is "Teams", this will include all opportunities owned by users below the role hierarchy.

Important Opportunities
Next is the "Important Opportunities", click this icon to filter opportunities that you have manually marked as important. This marking is for each user and can't be shared with other users. You can mark up to 200 opportunities as important. Those opportunities marked as important will be shown in the "My Important Opportunities" view too.

Pipeline Inspection Metrics
There are 8 metrics below the selection:

1. Total
2. Closed Won
3. Commit (with forecast categories of Closed Won or Commit)
4. Best Case (with forecast categories of Closed Won, Commit, Best Case)
5. Open Pipeline (with forecast categories of Commit, Best Case, Pipeline).
6. Closed Lost
7. Moved In (total opportunities moved into the selected period, including opportunities with closed date moved into the selected period and new opportunities created)
8. Moved Out (total opportunities moved out of the selected period, including opportunities with closed date in the selected period when it started and new opportunities created during the period)

Unfortunately, you cannot customize the metrics, such as using the Stage Name (without changing Forecast Category), renaming, or hiding any of the metrics, so vote for this idea. 

Clicking the metric will filter the opportunities shown in the table below the metrics.

When clicking the Opportunity tab, all users will always land in Total metrics for This Month for Me, it will be great if the system remembers my last filters and metrics selected.

Setup
1. Enable Pipeline Inspection from the setup menu, this will auto-enable historical trending for opportunities.
2. Enable the Pipeline Inspection button in the Opportunity object, look from "List View Button Layout".
3. Assign permission set to users, it can be the standard permission set "Pipeline Inspection User", or custom permission set with the Pipeline Inspection license.

View
Once setup is completed, to access Pipeline Inspection, users must click the "Pipeline Inspection" button from the Opportunity tab, so this is not to replace the list view. Admin is unable to set the user by default landed at Pipeline Inspection when clicking the Opportunity tab. But, the system will remember if you are in Pipeline Inspection or list view, the next time you click the Opportunity tab, you will be landed based on your last usage. 

As mentioned in the important opportunities above, there will be 2 views available by default, "My Pipeline" (default) and "My Important Opportunities". You can create a new view for yourself or for your users, but you cannot modify the default "My Pipeline" view for your users, so vote for my idea here.

There are 10 fields added by default:

1. Opportunity Name (with Deal Insight overview)
2. Mark Important
3. Account Name
4. Amount (with the increase or decrease indicator)
5. Close Date (with indicator initial push date and Einstein prediction)
6. Stage
7. Recent Activity (how many days ago)
8. Forecast Category
9. Next Step (with an indicator if not updated and when the last update)
10. Owner Full Name

There are 3 useful fields that can be added:

1. Push Count

2. Opportunity Score

3. Top Insight (if you have Einstein Opportunity Insights enabled)

Sample Pipeline Inspection

Deal Insight Overview next to the Opportunity name:

Insight for Close Date

Stage changed information

Information for the Next Step

Idea Exchange

Because Pipeline Inspection is pretty new and only available for Unlimited, Performance, and users that purchase the Revenue Intelligence license, there are not many ideas created and voted on by the community, here are a few worth to vote:

• My Pipeline default field in Opportunity Pipeline Inspection (20 points)
• Pipeline Inspection, disable partner users (20 points)
• Ability to hide metrics in Pipeline Inspection (70 points)
• Pipeline Inspection - allow use of custom Amount field (350 points)
• Pipeline Inspection - allow system admins to set default fields and filters (180 points)
• Able to customize Pipeline Inspection filter (120 points)
• Export from Pipeline Inspection (130 points)

Salesforce: Account Team List View and Opportunity Team List View

Many years back, we wrote a blog on options in reports to show the account team and in the opportunity team, the similar options are available in List View too, let's check out:

In the Account report type, we have the option to show:

1. All accounts
2. My accounts
3. My accounts team's accounts
4. My accounts team and my accounts
5. My team's accounts

In Account list view:

1. All accounts
2. My accounts
3. My accounts teams

The first two options are clear, show all accounts or my accounts.

"My accounts teams", is similar to "My accounts team's accounts" in the report type, where the result ONLY accounts where you are in the Account Team.

The same applies in the Opportunity Team list view too, in the Opportunity report type, we have:

1. All opportunities
2. My opportunities
3. My team-selling opportunities
4. My team-selling and my opportunities 
5. My team's opportunities
6. My team-selling and their opportunities

In the Opportunity List view:

1. All opportunities
2. My opportunities
3. My opportunities teams
4. My team's opportunities

The first two options are clear, show all accounts or my accounts.

"My opportunities teams" -- all opportunities where you are in the Opportunity Team, this is similar to "My team-selling opportunities" in the report.

"My team's opportunities" -- all opportunities owned by me and owned by users below my role hierarchy, including all that report to my direct reports.

Reference:

• Salesforce: Account Team Report
• Salesforce: Opportunity Team Report

Salesforce: Default Opportunity Team

In the previous post, we discussed Default Account Team, this post would be on Default Opportunity Team. Opportunity Team defines additional users that are involved when working in an Opportunity, with or without giving extra access to the team members to that Opportunity.

Opportunity Team is pretty similar to Account Team, but there is a difference in some areas, let's see as below.

What the same?

1. Both are defined in the user detail

2. Both can add or not add extra access to users added with a team role as team members

3. Both have a list of Team Roles and share the same values

4. Both have a Default team for a user

5. Both can be set up automatically add the default team to accounts or open opportunities when the user own Account or Opportunity

6. Both can add users as the default team on existing accounts or open opportunities

7. Both can manually Add Default Team from the Account Team or Opportunity Team related list

8. One user can be added only once to the Account team and to the Opportunity team

What difference?

1. In the Account team, the user can give access to Account, Contact, Opportunity, and Case, while in the Opportunity team, only can give access to the Opportunity.

Default Account Team

Default Opportunity Team

2. You can add account team members as opportunity teams from Opportunity Team related list.

Manual add user to Account Team

Manual add user to Opportunity Team

Salesforce: Default Account Team

We have discussed Account Team and Opportunity Team quite a lot in this blog simplysfdc.com, here is the summary: 

• Account Team Report: multiple report results by selecting different options in Show Me using Account with Account Teams report type, also the difference with Account report type.

• Add button in Opportunity Team & Account Team, why the Add button does not appear in the Opportunity Team related list, also a few facts about Account Team and Opportunity Team.

• Account Team Member and Account Share, the structure behind Account Team Member and Account Share object.

• My Account Teams List View, using Account Teams in List View.

• Opportunity Team Report, similar to Account Team Report, but this one is for Opportunity, also in this blog.

• Email Alert Recipients, using Account Team and Opportunity Team as recipients in the Email Alert.

So what is Account Team in short? Account Team defines additional users that are involved in an Account, in addition to the Account Owner. The additional users added as the Account Team can have extra access permission or without extra permission Account and on the related Contact, Opportunity, and Case. 

In this blog, we will discuss using Default Account Team, the keyword here is Default. One user can only have one default account team (and one default opportunity team). The default account team is defined at the user detail, which is the Account Owner. This setting can be performed by the Account owner or users above the owner in the role hierarchy and having Read access on the account object.

Automatically add my default account team to accounts that I create or accounts that are transferred to me

The Default Account Team can be configured to be automatic, which means when the user owns an Account or Opportunity, the default team will be added automatically. To automate this, make sure "Automatically add my default account team to accounts that I create or accounts that are transferred to me" is selected. This setting applies to ALL users added as Account Team.

Similar to Account Team, you need to set access of Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case access, and Team Role when adding each user into for Default Account Team.

Default Account Team

If the checkbox "Automatically add..." is not selected, the Default Account Team will only be added when the user clicks the "Add Default Team" button from the Account Team related list.

Manually add Account Team

Update account teams with these members

To add the new members added to the default team for all existing accounts owned by the user, select Update account teams with these members when adding the users. You also can add an existing user who has been added as Account Team by editing the user in the Account team and selecting Update the account teams of my existing accounts.

Automatically add my default account team to accounts that I create or accounts that are transferred to me -- this applies to all users for an account owner.

Update account teams with these members -- apply only to selected users in the account team, this will only add users to the Account team. 

However, a user can be added to the Account Team only once, even with a different Team Role, so adding the same user to the Account Team will overwrite the existing user in the Account Team. The overwritten behavior applies to manually adding the default Account Team from the "Add Default Team" button.

Reference:

• Set Up a Default Account Team

Salesforce: Opportunity Trends Report Type

We discussed a few objects related to Opportunity in detail in the previous blog, from:
- OpportunityFeed
- OpportunityFieldHistory
- OpportunityHistory
- Opportunity__hd

Also, a few report types related to Opportunity:
- Opportunity Field History
- Opportunity History
- Opportunities with Historical Trending

There is one more report type we have not discussed so far Opportunity Trends report type. The good thing about this report type is, it is enabled by default, however, you can't really customize a lot.

Opportunity Trends report takes a Snapshot "As of" the 1st of the month each passing month. These snapshots cannot look forward and the snapshot date and frequency can't be changed. If an opportunity created on 20 Nov 2018, the first snapshot for would be on 1 Dec 2018.

This report type will have information on:
- Historical Amount
- Historical Stage
- Historical Close Date
- Historical Probability
- As of Date

sample report

I do not see any object that stored this data, but let me know if you found it.


Reference:

• Opportunity Trend report differs from the output of Opportunity History report
• Opportunity Trends Report
• As of date on Opportunity Trend Report

Salesforce: Not allow Opportunity back to the previous Stage

Use Case: biz team decide to set a rule that Opportunity Stage are not allowed back to the previous Stage and team decide not to add number in the Stage as prefix.

Solution: create a validation rule with hard code each stage with a number, but the number only valid for the validation rule.

Let's say this is our Stage for open Opportunity from beginning till before closed.

• Prospecting
• Qualification
• Needs Analysis
• Value Proposition
• Id. Decision Makers
• Perception Analysis
• Proposal/Price Quote
• Negotiation/Review

Validation rule:

 CASE   
 (   
      StageName ,   
           "Prospecting", 1,   
           "Qualification", 2,   
           "Needs Analysis", 3,   
           "Value Proposition", 4,   
           "Id. Decision Makers", 5,   
           "Perception Analysis", 6,       
           "Proposal/Price Quote", 7,   
           "Negotiation/Review", 8,   
           0   
 )   
 <   
 CASE   
 (   
      PRIORVALUE(StageName) ,   
           "Prospecting", 1,   
           "Qualification", 2,   
           "Needs Analysis", 3,   
           "Value Proposition", 4,   
           "Id. Decision Makers", 5,   
           "Perception Analysis", 6,       
           "Proposal/Price Quote", 7,   
           "Negotiation/Review", 8,   
           0   
 )  

Salesforce: My Account Teams List View

In the previous blog, we discussed options on the Account Team and Opportunity Team when generating reports. The other option for users to know if they are part of the Account Team or Opportunity Team is from List View.

In a custom list view, you can filter account lists by the account teams in which you are a member.

When creating or editing a custom list view for accounts, select the My Account Teams filter, the same in Opportunity List view you can filter by owner My Opportunity Teams.

My Account Teams :

• I am a member of the Account Team, no matter who is the Account owner.
• This will not include of my subordinates who is member of Account Team

My Opportunity Teams:

• I am a member of the Opportunity Team, no matter who is the Opportunity owner.
• This will not include of my subordinates who is member of Opportunity Team

Salesforce: Opportunity Team Report

Previous blog discussed about reports related to Account Team, this blog is the continuation discussed on Opportunity Team.

If your company practice team selling, you can enable Opportunity Team in Salesforce from Setup | Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Teams | Opportunity Team Settings, then select Enable Team Selling.

When running an opportunities report, you have several choices in the standard filter area that allow you to choose what types of records should be searched. Once Opportunity Team Selling feature enabled, you will have additional options when running Opportunity report.

This is options available before enable Team Selling

This is options available after enable Team Selling

The list below identifies what each choice means and how it affects the scope of your report data:

My opportunities:
ONLY the opportunities you OWNED.

My team-selling opportunities:
ONLY the opportunities where you are on the SALES TEAM.

My team-selling and my own opportunities:
Opportunities OWNED by you & opportunities where you are on the SALES TEAM.

My team's opportunities:
Opportunities OWNED by you & users who report to you in the role hierarchy.

My team's team-selling and their opportunities:
Opportunities OWNED by you & users that report to you in the role hierarchy, ALSO opportunities where you & users who report to you in the role hierarchy are on the SALES TEAM.

All opportunities:
ALL opportunities visible by the user who run the report.


Note: When Opportunity Split enabled, opportunity owner will be automatically added into Opportunity Team with role = Opportunity Owner, read this blog.


Reference: Opportunity Reports: Opportunity Team Selling

Salesforce: Lead Source fields

When adding new Contact or Lead to a CRM system, you would like to note how you get know to that person? That's why by default Salesforce provide standard field or Lead Source is 4 main objects below, and they are picklist fields. You can customize the values based on your organization business model.

1. Lead - Lead Source
2. Account - Account Source
3. Contact - Lead Source
4. Opportunity - Lead Source

Over the time, you may modify the lead source values accordingly, but to note that: the values of 4 fields above in 4 objects above are in sync, this mean, if you add a new Lead Source value in Lead, it will copy to other objects, the same when you edit, delete and re-order values.

When you convert a Lead to Account, Contact and Opportunity, the conversion value of Lead Source from Lead will bring to Contact and Opportunity Lead Source.

Reference:

• Add/create a new Lead Source
• Lead Conversion Mapping
• Lead Conversion Field Mapping

Salesforce: Adding Product to Opportunity Layout

Product is nothing new in Salesforce, it has been available in Salesforce for long long time, although there is no enhancements in last couple of release (except adding into Salesforce1 app), but it still widely used in new Salesforce implementation. Product is a special object, from layout and relation to other objects, and etc.

To add Products to Opportunity, scroll down to the Opportunity Lines related list in Opportunity page layout. At the same area, user able to choose a Price Book:

• Product availability and List Price is based on Price Book selected 
• Only 1 price book for each Opportunity, changing Price Book in an Opportunity will delete all existing Opportunity Lines
• If you have multi-currencies enabled, available products will be based on Opportunity currency and Products added to the Price Book for that currency. 

This would be a simple blog to explain how to configure layout related to Product.

1. Opportunity Line Selection
When user click Add Opportunity Line button, a special page 'Opportunity Line Selection' showing available products related to the selected Price Book and Opportunity currency, where user also can search by keyword to limit products shown.

We cannot configure search functionality at upper part of this screen, but we can configure columns show for the Products at lower part.

Navigate to Setup | Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Products | Search Layouts. There will be only 1 layout here, changes made to it will affect all product search layouts. However, Product Name cannot be removed and must be the first field in the layout. 

2. Add Opportunity Line
User click checkboxes next to the product in screenshot above to select the product, then click Select button, system will bring you to 'Add Opportunity Line' page. All selected products in previous screen will be shown here, where user need to enter additional information for each product line. We can customize columns and make it as mandatory fields.

To customize columns shown in Add Opportunity Line, navigate to Setup | Customize | Opportunities | Opportunity Products | Page Layouts | Edit Multi-Line Layout. Fields available in Edit Multi-Line Layout is based on field added into Opportunity Product Page Layout, this mean you will not see the field in Multi-Line layout if that field is not added into Opportunity Product Page Layout. The same for mandatory fields, if the field is set as mandatory in Opportunity Product Page Layout, it will be mandatory as well in Edit Multi-Line Layout.

The same layout will be used when user click Edit All button in Opportunity Lines related list.

By default, Sales Price and Quantity is mandatory fields and cannot be removed from page layout, but if your organization do not use quantity, example: for company selling Service instead of Product, you can reach Salesforce support to request to make it as not mandatory in page layout, see this article How can I make Sales Price or Quantity 'optional' on an Opportunity line item?

As admin, you can lock the Sales Price to read-only for users, so Sales Price will always the same with List Price defined in the Price Book, but users still can give Discount (if the field added to the layout). To configure this, navigate to user Profile and disable Edit Opportunity Product Sales Price permission in General User Permissions section.

Reference:

• How can I make Sales Price or Quantity 'optional' on an Opportunity line item?
• How do I Allow my Users to Edit the Opportunity Product Sales Price?
• Editing Multi-Line Layouts for Opportunity Products

Salesforce: Track converted Account or Opportunity from Lead

When a Lead in converted into Account, Contact and Opportunity in Salesforce, you can easily track what is the Account and Contact created (or attach to existing Account and Contact), included Opportunity created (if any). By opening the converted Lead in Salesforce, it will show you the Account, Contact and Opportunity name and link, although you will no longer see the Lead detail, except using "Leads with converted information" report.

But, looking from Account, Contact and Opportunity perspective, it is not easy to identify which of them are converted from Lead. However, if you have field history tracking enabled, looking at the object history related list will tell you if the record is created by Lead conversion or not.

Account History

Opportunity Field History

This will be not ideal if you would like to run a report of Account or Opportunity with Lead conversion information, because that information relationship only available in report with type Leads with converted lead information.

Workaround: we can built a simple solution (without code), in this scenario, we would like to report if the Opportunity is created from Lead conversion, and if yes, from which Lead.

1. Create Custom Text Field at Opportunity
Create a custom text field in Opportunity, and make sure with 15 or more characters length.

2. Create a Custom Formula Field at Lead
This formula will return in Text format. The formula would be just a simple Id that will return 15 characters length of the Lead Id, or CASESAFEID(id) to return 18 characters length of the Lead Id.

3. Map Lead Field
From Lead field setup, map custom formula field at Lead to custom text field at Opportunity, this is fields we just created above.

4. Done
Pretty easy, isn't it? From now on, we will be able to tell by running an opportunity report, if the Lead Id is not blank, the Opportunity is created from Lead conversion, otherwise it is not created from Lead conversion.


How to handle if user Clone the Opportunity?
A classic issue that we thought that the Lead Id will be bring over to the new Opportunity cloned, so the Lead Id information is no longer correct. This is only true if we add Lead Id custom text field in to Opportunity page layout.

This mean, Clone function will only clone fields that show in the page layout. By remove that field in the page layout, it will not clone Lead Id. See sample below:

As a double protection to make sure the Lead Id will never be cloned to the new opportunity:
1. Set the text field in Opportunity to 18 characters (for case insensitive Id)
2. Set the text field in Opportunity as Unique and not Case Sensitive
3. Set the formula field in Lead to CASESAFEID(id)

This will protect if in the future, someone build a custom clone functionality, system will throw error by not allowing duplicate Lead Id in Opportunity.

Salesforce: Opportunity Age and Stage Duration

Few months back, we discussed Last Activity date fields, which only available in  Report, List View, and API (including Formula Field, Workflow and Validation Rule) for Account, Contact, Opportunity and Lead object.

This blog will cover 2 more fields : Age and Stage Duration. These fields only available in Standard Opportunity report type, but not using custom opportunity report type.

Age
For open opportunity, the number of days since the opportunity Created Date until Today.

For closed opportunity, the number of days between opportunity Created Date until Close Date (not when it closed). This include Closed Won and Closed Lost opportunities.


Stage Duration
The is number of days of opportunity from the date when opportunity change to current Stage until Today. The number of days still counting even for closed opportunity. You can monitor Last Modified date in Stage History of opportunity related list .


Reference:

• Tips for Working with Opportunity Reports
• How can I report on the Stage Duration of an Opportunity?