Oftentimes, your team will have your own stage values laid out for Swantide to implement. We recommend using your own sales process stages if you have them, however, if you don't here are our recommended Opportunity stage values:

When using values outside of the Swantide recommended values, please see the following tips on sales ops best practices:

We recommend creating clearly defined interim stages so that it is easy for reps to understand at what points Opportunities should be advanced through the deal cycle. Additionally, instead of having naming conventions with solely numbers (Eg. Stage 1, Stage 2, Stage 3), we highly recommend having more descriptive Stage Names to have a clear understanding with your team on where the Opportunity is in a given time.

We recommend using only Closed Won and Closed Lost as closing stage values to keep data as clean and streamlined as possible. Additionally, closed Opportunities should represent a point in time for an individual deal cycle. Essentially, once an Opportunity is Closed, it should no longer be a living object.
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​Some examples:
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​Revisit/Recycle: we have seen sales stage values include Closed Lost stages such as Recycle or Revisit, in addition to the Closed Lost stage. This indicates that an Opportunity should/could be re-opened at a later date. However, if an Opportunity was re-opened, and moved back through the stages, you would lose the insights into how quickly a deal cycle moved the second time around versus the first deal cycle data that had been lost.
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​Proposed Solution: Instead of choosing values like Recycle, instead we recommend utilizing the Swantide Field "Loss Reason" and create a value for this pick-list field such as "Revisit/Recycle." Then you will be able to quickly pull a report of Opportunities that have this loss reason, and can revisit those Accounts and create new Opportunities as you see fit. That way, the data from the first and second Opportunities are retained and can be used for analysis effectively.
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​Onboarding/Implementation: another sales stage we have seen is a stage option for Onboarding or Implementation, in addition to the standard Closed Won stage. Since we want Opportunities to represent a point in time on a deal cycle, there should be a clear ending stage whether it is Closed Won or Closed Lost. If it is Closed Won and there is Onboarding or Implementation information that should be tracked, we recommend doing this on its own record.
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​Proposed Solution: use the Onboarding Cycle custom object and create separate records to track post-sale processes and timelines. This gives you the ability to track high level onboarding information like go-live dates and track the post-sale process as its own object. This way, you can collect data on how long Onboarding Cycles typically take and if you want to implement Onboarding Cycle stages (Kickoff, Configuration, Live, etc) you can do so.
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​Pairs well with the Swantide Workflow to Automatically Create Onboarding Cycles when a New Business Opportunity is Closed/Won