Coaching Your Sales Team in Salesforce.com – Demand What’s Next

Opportunity Next StepOne of the best, and least utilized, OOTB (Out-Of-The-Box) features within Salesforce.com is the Next Step field on Opportunities.  It asks each Opportunity Owner for a simple phrase or sentence that identifies what is the next step in closing the deal.  In coaching Sales reps, we love to see the Next Step field displayed on all Views and Reports, and even made required on the Opportunity Layout… or better yet, required (via Validation Rule) to be updated upon each change of Opportunity Stage.  This provides sales management a way to help steer their sales execs on the path toward their best-practice route to closing deals.

And besides, if a rep can’t clearly identify the Next Step, is the deal really still in play?

Opportunity Next Step

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February 16, 2012

David Carnes - Founder & CEO

about the author

David Carnes

David is OpFocus’ Founder and CEO. He is a frequent speaker at Salesforce and Salesforce community events around the world, and is a Salesforce MVP.  For four years, David hosted Dashboard Dōjō, which provides recordings of more than forty free training sessions on Salesforce reports and dashboards. After being approached by O’Reilly Media, he wrote the book Mastering Salesforce Reports and Dashboards.

In his early career, David worked in IT and operations for software companies, developing an interest in CRM, marketing automation, and analytics while building out systems, processes, data, and reporting for the business teams he supported. He earned a Masters in Software Engineering and credits a Harvard summer class in database management for opening his eyes to what systems and data could do to support operations. In founding OpFocus in 2006 David took another step toward focusing on business operations, seizing on Salesforce’s vision and never looking back.