When changing Opportunity stages in Salesforce, it's important to follow a structured process to ensure smooth transition and minimal disruption to your sales team's workflow. Here are the steps you should consider, while leveraging the Swantide App to ensure you manage an end-to-end process change:
Assess Your Current Process
Before diving into this project, it's important to understand why the Sales team wants to change the Opportunity stages. Is it due to changes in the sales process, company goals, or other factors? This will help you tailor the changes accordingly, or determine if modifying the sales process is actually the right approach. Perhaps there is an alternative solution that minimizes disruption.
Review Existing Opportunity Stages
Once you determine that modifying the sales process is the right path forward, take the necessary time to closely look at the current Opportunity stages in Salesforce. Document each stage and its associated probability, forecast category, and any automation or workflows tied to them.
A best practice is to leverage the Catalog in the Swantide app to identify flows, validation rules, and other dependencies on your Opportunity Stage. Below is a step by step process for how to leverage the catalog to accomplish this:
Open the Swantide app and navigate to 'Catalog' on the left side panel.
To search for all metadata components that relate to your Opportunity Stages, search for Oppotunity.StageName in the search bar.
Click the component labeled Opportunity.StageName (this is the Salesforce metadata name for Opportunity Stage) to see the specific information about your Opportunity Stages. Once on this page, see all the active sales stages and AI documentation about the field.
Once on the component page, click on the 'References' button to see all the metadata components in your Salesforce that are touched by your Opportunity Sales Stage field. To filter to a specific type of metadata, use the filter drop down on the right side of the page to select the type you are interested in exploring.
A great use case is to Filter to 'Flow' or 'Validation Rule', since these are the most common areas that rely on specific Opportunity Stages (i.e. exit criteria, time stamping flows, slack notifications, etc.).
Once you filter to a specific component type, click into each individual component to review the AI documentation of the intention of the component to determine an impact analysis.
A great best practice is to follow these steps for each of the component types you think will be impacted by modifying your Sales process. Document each flow, validation rule, report, etc. and keep track of the component that needs to be update and its status
Gather Requirements For Proposed New Process
Meet with key stakeholders from the Sales team to gather their requirements for the new Opportunity stages. Understand what specific changes they want and why. This could involve adding, removing, or modifying stages, as well as adjusting probabilities and forecast categories.
Once you've gathered all the requirements from your stakeholders, review your Catalog documentation and determine which Salesforce processes need to be updated to meet your stakeholders needs.
Communicate With Your Stakeholders
Communicate the upcoming changes to all relevant stakeholders, including the Sales team, sales managers, and any other departments or teams impacted by the changes. Clearly explain the reasons for the changes and how they will benefit the organization.
Plan And Build Your Changes
Based on the requirements gathered, plan out the changes to the Opportunity stages. Determine how each stage will be configured in Salesforce, including probability, forecast category, and any associated picklist values.
At this point, it's best practice to build a Sandbox environment to test your changes and make sure you've thought through your entire end-to-end sales process.
Test Your New Process
This step is crucial. Once you've built the required changes in your Sandbox environment, it's important to run UAT (User Acceptance Testing). Scope several real-life examples of how users interact with your Salesforce (i.e. move an Opportunity from Stage 1 to 2, Close an Opportunity, etc.) and validate that flows and validation rules work as expected. It's recommended to gather test cases from 'power users' and get their feedback to make sure the end user experience works as expected.
Backup Your Salesforce Data
Before making any changes, backup your Salesforce data to ensure you can revert to the previous state if needed. We recommend including the Opportunity ID, Stage, and any other important information.
Train Your End Users
Provide training to the Sales team on how to use the new Opportunity stages. Ensure they understand the purpose of each stage, how to progress opportunities through the pipeline, and any changes to their workflow or reporting.
Deploy Your Changes To Production
Once testing is complete and users are trained, deploy the changes to the production environment. Monitor the system closely after deployment to address any issues that may arise.
Monitor And Iterate
Keep an eye on how the Sales team is using the new Opportunity stages. Gather feedback and make any necessary adjustments to optimize the process over time.
By following these steps, you can successfully implement changes to Opportunity stages in Salesforce while minimizing disruption to your sales team's operations.