Optimize Salesforce Forecasting & Revenue Recognition with Related Opps

Sometimes when we are selling related deals within Salesforce it can be difficult to determine which Opportunities relate to one another when we are looking at the Account level. For organizations that experience this challenge an Opportunity hierarchy can be very helpful in tracking and forecasting multi-year deals or a contract’s total value. Take a look at the below example to see how we can tackle this challenge using a Custom Parent Opportunity Object related to Accounts and Opportunities. Here you can see that the related Opportunities represent 3 years worth of deals that can be tracked at the parent level. Each Opportunity under the parent has it’s own Amount, Stage, Close Date, Probability, Expected Revenue, and Products associated to it. This allows you to close a first year deal and report this revenue as well as keep the other associated deals open for forecasting purposes.

Now let’s look at what a report might look like for a Sales Manager.

Here we see that the amount can be summarized at the parent level. Additionally we can average probability and sum the Expected Revenue to get a ballpark on what the entire deal is currently worth. The best part is it takes very few configuration steps to get this set up in your Salesforce instance! Let’s get started!

Configuration Steps:

Step 1: Create a custom Object titled “Parent Opportunity” (Additionally, create a custom Tab).

Step 2: Create a custom lookup field to Account on the Parent Opportunity (Be sure to add the related list of Parent Opportunities to the Account page layout).

Step 3: Create a lookup field on the Standard Opportunity Object that looks up to the new Custom Parent Opportunity you have just created. (Be sure to add the related list of Opportunities to the Parent Opportunity page layout).

It’s that simple! Now you are ready to group related Opportunities under a Parent Opportunity and open up potential for more accurate Forecasting and Revenue Recognition using standard Salesforce configuration!