How to Easily Clean Your Salesforce Pipeline
It’s the first of the year and as you login to Salesforce.com and begin refreshing your Salesforce pipelines and reports you will see many of your graphs, speedometers, line charts and much more not only revert back to zero but some of your pipelines just may not be accurate. But we all know that if you’re working with dirty data (read more about Dirty Data Syndrome) then you are managing a mess and if your pipeline is a mess then it is even more of a challenge to meet your quotas and goals. So if you have not done so yet today (January 1, 2014) is a great
[tweet_quote] time to set some time aside and make sure your Salesforce pipeline is clean and ready for use.[/tweet_quote] This way, when you get back into the office tomorrow you are starting with a clean set of data and spending your time on a good pipeline.
The Path to a Cleaner Pipeline
- Go to Reports
- Click New Report
- Click the “+” next to Opportunities
- Click Opportunities
- Click the Create button
- Now you are in your report and Salesforce will automatically add fields into the report but many of these you do not need. So I recommend removing all fields that were automatically put in there except the Opportunity Name, Account Name, Close Date, Stage and Opportunity Owner.
- Personally, I organize our sales pipelines by stages so I can get a better view of everything. If you wish to do the same then click Tabular Format -> Summary.
- Drag the”Stage field into the “Drag a field here to create grouping“.
- To make sure you have all the opportunities in the pipeline in this report go to the filtering area in the top of the browser and select:
- Show – All Opportunities
- Opportunity Status – Open
- Date Field – Close Date
- Range – Previous CY (Calendar Year)
- Click Run Report
You will now get a report of all your past due opportunities. Click each opportunity in the report and I recommend opening each one in another tab. As you go into each opportunity record make sure you update the values accordingly.
We recommend paying special close attention to the close date. If the opportunity is still alive then move the close date to a date in the future. Also, if the opportunity is not worth pursuing then update the stage so it is omitted from your pipeline. Once you have gone through all the opportunities then go to the report and click Run Report again. If the report is empty then you have successfully cleaned your pipeline and it’s in good shape as you start off the new year.