How to expedite Sales win rate in Salesforce -- My Salesforce Knowledge Article

 Objective: 

Welcome to this chapter where we would be exploring an approach that can increase sales win rate. Irrespective of a company size, i presume we all have seen 

• Our sales sometimes struggle with their win rate%. As a result Win Rate velocity for Opportunities is uneven.
• Our Sales rush at the end of their month or quarter to close a lot of deals.
• As a result of above, our platform could see spike in transactions at the end month/quarter which can sometimes prove detrimental to platform stability.

To overcome above situation lets look at Universal Containers usecase below and the approach they took to solve this.

Usecase:

Universal Builders are seeing many open opportunities being created and not closing on time. These are not encouraging signs for their Sales VP as the company's Win Rate velocity is disrupted. 

Sales VP intimates this situation to their solution architect, whose design is as below.

• To ensure an opportunity gets closed on time, they define an expiration date, which is a few days prior to the close date. This is to encourage the sales team to close the opportunity prior to the expiration date, thereby having a high win rate. 
• We would then like to define an opportunity as urgent when it's past its expiration date and still open.

 
For instance, an opportunity has an urgent picklist field with values "Yes" and "No". The customer would like to mark open opportunities as urgent (with picklist field value as Yes) via an automation technique if the opportunity is past the expiration date.

Solution:

To set the context, let's assume that the customer's Salesforce instance already has the below fields created:
 

1. Opportunity Expiration Date -> Date field capturing Opportunity expiration.
2. Urgent Opportunity -> A picklist field of Value "Yes" and "No". Please note that default value for the Picklist Is "No".
3. Potential Urgent Opportunity (Potential_urgent__c) -> A formula field which checks If Opportunity Is Open and opportunity has crossed expiration date. Formula would look like: 

Here we are checking if the opportunity is not closed or won and if it has crossed the expiration date. 

With the above fields created, let's now look at the approach to updating the "Urgent Opportunity" picklist from "No" to "Yes".

We will be using a Scheduled flow which would run on a daily basis to update the Opportunity picklist field from "No" to "Yes". The reason we go with scheduled flow is that it will help to query all opportunities that have crossed their expiration even if they did not get updated on that day. Hence, to cover this outlier situation, a scheduled flow is being considered. The design of the Scheduled Flow is as below:

With the above solution, Universal Containers were able to successfully flag urgent opportunities and push Sales for an improved Win Rate. We can also consider sending an email alert to the opportunity owner to act on such opportunities accordingly.

This got their Sales VP as well as their Sales Managers excited and hopefully we will be seeing an improved Sales performance for Universal Containers.

Note: Above flow Design can be optimized as appropriate and this article is only promoting the design concept to meet the objective.

Article Links/References

I am proud to share that above knowledge article was authored by myself for Salesforce and got published as below:

Urgent Opportunities Knowledge Article

I hope above content was helpful.