Pilot/Trial Opportunities

If you are providing Pilot or Trial offerings to your customers and want to track this data in Salesforce, we have a few different ways and Swantide Workflows to accommodate this.

A key question to ask yourself is: are these trial or pilot offerings a part of the majority of our deals? Or are these one-off components to a deal cycle? Do we consider a Pilot or Trial Opportunity as Closed prior to negotiating the contract for revenue? What types of reports are we looking to pull?

Stage Considerations

If a Trial or Pilot is a part of a large majority of your Opportunities - sometimes, it is helpful to include a Stage option for "Pilot" or "Trial" that you can track the deal as it moves through this stage, observe how many days are spent in the stage before moving to a negotiation and subsequent Closed Won stages, etc.

Something to keep in mind when going this route is if you want to enforce Opportunities move stage-by-stage (which we often recommend for funnel reporting), is that when this Stage is not applicable - it could impact reporting in that way. If you like this option the best, but are worried about this impact - talk to your Swantide CSM about potentially enforcing all stage progression outside of the pilot/trial stage - which can also be a very viable option!

Field Considerations

Sometimes, all you need to track this data is checkbox/pick-list or date field to say if the Opportunity contained a Pilot/Trial offering. Then you can report on the Opps with this information and see which were Won/Lost that contained Trial.

Type Considerations

If this is truly a separate deal cycle - we recommend creating a separate Opportunity Type (typically just New Business, Renewal, and Expansion) to track the Opportunity Pilot/Trial separately than Opportunities in general - if you'd like to go this route, please reach out to your Swantide CSM for next steps on Workflow Enablement.