Fix Your Stage Probability in Salesforce

It's difficult to know what to set your stage probability when you first create a sales process. In this video Brian Hays shows you how to build a report in Salesforce to see what your historical close rate by stage is. You can then use that report to update your stage probabilities.
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[@eraajkhan]

Thanks for sharing this info! Great way to make probability % more objective in the sales process rather than just guessing and adding random probability %.

[@Rotive]

Glad it was helpful. Thank you for the comment!

[@markuskeller1483]

Really appreciate your video tutorial. makes it easy to set up those things that should be there out of the box. Thanks!

[@Rotive]

Glad it was helpful, Mark!

[@shomailakhan2013]

This is brilliant. Thank you for sharing

[@Rotive]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@JenniferCorbitt-Woods]

This was great! Thank you! I have a question. What if an opportunity shows up multiple times on a from stage because it has gone in and out of that stage a few times. Shouldn't we account for that in the conversion? If the Unique Opportunity count for each stage is less that the row count in each stage should we still use the RowCount for conversion?. If not, and we should use a unique count, how would one go about doing that?

[@Rotive]

Good question! You're right, if an opportunity went through a stage multiple times, that would throw off the conversion rate. You could potentially group by the won check box and use the Count Unique dropdown on the Opportunity ID field to get you a more accurate number. You would then need to create a summary level formula that references sub groups which can be tricky. I'd have to try it out to make sure it's possible. Have you found a solution to this?

[@BenHadman]

Thanks for this! This is quite different to how I think about probability if I understand how the report works properly.
This report is looking at the changes in a certain 'from stage' moving straight to 'Closed' in one-fell-swoop stage change?
I have trained my team to take every opportunity through standard opportunity process where jumping from an early stage to Closed never happens, because there is a considerable 'Exit Criteria' for each stage and meeting several Exit Criteria in one go doesn't happen in practice.
So i'm not sure how useful this method for calculating probability is? Am I going against the grain?
The way I've always thought of Probability is the likelihood of an opportunity closing by the current Close Date.
I've never actually calculated this properly because of working in early stage companies and not having much data but I would use Snapshots to check over old data (or maybe opp field history).

[@Rotive]

Hey there, Thanks for the comment.
This report isn't looking at the probability of an opportunity jumping from a stage to Closed/Won. It's looking at the probability an opportunity will eventually be Closed/Won if it passes through that stage.
That being said, there are many ways to handle forecasting and probability. You should take on an approach that works best for your business. I like considering the percentage of deals that make it Closed/Won broken out by the stages they went through, because I can multiply that percentage by the opportunity amount to give me an expected value. I many have $100K of deals sitting in the Interest stage but if I know only 20% of those deals tend to eventually make it to Closed/Won, I can project an income of $20K in the future and plan around that.

[@NicolasMontchery]

Smart

[@Rotive]

Thanks, Nicolas!