This article covers these topics:

Fitness gives you a “state of the nation” view of the health of your Opportunities or Leads. Fitness is configurable using both pre-defined, and custom, Indicators.

Opportunity Fitness is designed to give users an at-a-glance overview of how each Opportunity is tracking against criteria such as “Is it being proactively managed by the owner?”, “Is the Owner in regular touch with the main Contact(s)”, “Is there a planned next step?”, “Is the Opportunity being pushed out or devalued?”

Depending on the “answers” to these Indicators, each Opportunity’s Fitness is evaluated - and visually presented - as “Looking Good”, “Notice”, “Pay Attention” and “At Risk”

Your organisation can choose which predefined system - or custom - Fitness Indicators to use and how to configure the rules that apply to them. Your Pipeliner Admins then set these up for you in the Admin Module ⤵

Fitness can also be applied to Leads though a smaller selection of (relevant) System indicators is supported.

When you’re thinking about the health of Opportunities, your Sales teams will first need to consider how best to define “Fit” vs “Unfit”. Then a set of criteria needs to be developed which can be represented by Opportunity Fitness Indicators. This is not a one-size-fits-all feature - it’s designed to work for your specific business criteria. Depending on how well defined your processes are, you may need some help with this.

Each Indicator can be varied as needed to be most efficient for a particular company by adjusting the rules that are applied. Each indicator can be set for all pipelines, for a selected pipeline, or for a specific stage of a particular sales process.

For each indicator, different Fitness notification levels can be set to appear. These are “Notice” “Pay attention” and “Take action”. The rules that apply to these levels can be customized by each company to indicate the urgency of the indicator as it applies to each opportunity.

Once you’ve identified the criteria you want to use for your Indicators, your Pipeliner Admins can implement them in the Admin Module using the Fitness tab in Fields & Forms>Opportunities.

Through extensive research, we have isolated 11 predefined indicators of opportunity fitness that can be utilized and tailored - using rules- by most enterprises:

Fitness is enabled for all customers by default using three of the predefined Indicators - “No Follow-Up”, “Closing Date Overdue” and “Tasks Overdue”.

For Leads, the default enabled Indicators are “No Follow-Up” and “Tasks Overdue”. “Low email outreach” and “Low engagement” can also be enabled for Leads.

In addition to using predefined Indicators, you can set up Custom Indicators based on your own Opportunity (or Lead) fields

You can view an Opportunity’s overall Fitness and the Indicators that have contributed to the fitness evaluation by hovering over an Opportunity ⤵

You can also add Fitness to your View options so Fitness is then indicated by the color-coded bar on the left side of each Opportunity’s card. This ensures you have an “always on” view of Fitness when using the Pipeline View ⤵

In the Compact View, Fitness is displayed under the Opportunity or Lead Name and clicking on the hyperlink will open up more information about the relevant Indicators ⤵

If you’re using the List View, you can add both the overall Fitness and the Opportunity Fitness Indicators fields to your displayed columns for Opportunities and for Leads ⤵

When you open up an Opportunity (or Lead) record, the overall Fitness is shown in the widget in the right hand panel ⤵

Click on the down arrow to open up the widget to see how the Opportunity measures up against the Fitness Indicators ⤵

Fitness is supported in the Archive. When an Opportunity is archived, the Fitness Indicators active at that time are remembered on the Opportunity. Users viewing the Opportunity in Archive will be able to see what Fitness Indicators were good/bad at the time when it was archived.

When viewing Indicators, you can click on any hyperlink to access more information about how the Indicator applies to the current Opportunity ⤵

Additionally, if you’re working from inside an open Opportunity record, the i icon gives you details of how the Indicator has been set up and the rules that apply for each Fitness level ⤵

The Fitness and Fitness Indicators fields can be used in Filter criteria and can also be added to Reports and used in Charts for Reports and Dashboards. See this article for more information on creating Charts and Dashboards ⤵

If your organization is one of our many customers that find Automatizer invaluable, you can also include Fitness and Fitness Indicators as Conditions in a Process.

See this article for more information on using Automatizer processes.

Opportunity Fitness Indicators are enabled and customised in the Admin Module in Fields & Forms>Opportunities. Click on the Fitness tab

First choose the Pipeline that you want to apply the Opportunity Fitness Indicators to, from the Opportunity Pipeline dropdown (if you have multiple pipelines)

By default, the System Indicators “Closing Date Overdue”, “No Follow-up” and “Tasks Overdue” will already be enabled. You can change the rules that apply to these Indicators or disable them. You can do the same with any of the other System Indicators that you want to use.

Click on the toggle switch to enable (or disable) an Indicator

Once enabled, click on the down arrow on the right hand side to open up the details panel for the Indicator

Choose the Sales Step (or leave on “All Sales Steps”) that you want the Indicator to apply to and then configure the rules you want to apply to each level of Fitness.

“Notice” is least urgent, moving through “Pay Attention” to “Take Action” which is most urgent and severe. You don’t need to use all levels - you can enable or disable each one using the toggle switch.

For our example, we’ll use the Value Decrease Indicator which we want to apply only when Opportunities reach the “Negotiating” sales step. We’ve decided that, in our organisation, Opportunity Values fluctuate throughout the life cycle of an Opportunity as a normal part of our process but, when the Negotiating stage is reached, this Indicator now becomes critical to our understanding of how well the Opportunity is tracking to close (and also for our Forecasts and revenue projections). We have weekly Sales Meetings and this is a key metric that we will review each week. We’ve also determined that small decreases are still OK but need flagging - we’ll use the “Notice” level for this - larger decreases in Opportunity Value then increase the level (severity) of the Indicator and how it contributes to the Fitness of the Opportunity.

Starting with “Notice”, we’re going to adjust both the % decrease for each level and the date period that applies

Carry out the same sort of steps for each of the predefined, system, indicators that you want to use.

Click on “Save” to apply your changes.

Click on “Add Custom Indicator” to create your own Indicators. These will be specific to your own Opportunity customisations in Pipeliner.

For our example, we’ve chosen a custom multi select checkbox field named “Engagement” which reflects the level of engagement with us of different stakeholder groups and our level of sales penetration into the target organization. We’ve established that this is an important Fitness Indicator from the Proposal sales step onwards (so not a concern at earlier stages). We want the “Pay Attention” level to be triggered when there is no wider engagement with users and management and “Take Action” when we’re only taking to a single main contact ……

Lead Fitness Indicators are enabled and customised in the Admin Module in Fields & Forms>Leads. Click on the Fitness tab and then enable, disable and customise in the same way as described for Opportunity Fitness.