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Working with Opportunities — Using Opportunity Fitness in Pipeliner
Working with Opportunities — Using Opportunity Fitness in Pipeliner

Learn how to use Fitness to enhance your view of the health of Opportunities in your pipeline(s) and Leads

Updated over a week ago

This article covers these topics:

Overview

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.

What are Fitness Indicators?

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.

Predefined (System) Fitness Indicators

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

  • Closing Date overdue - the Opportunity’s Closing Date is in the past

  • No Follow-up - There are no Activities (Tasks or Appointments) linked to the individual Opportunity (or Lead, if you’re using as a Lead Fitness Indicator) that are in a Status of “Not Started”, “In Progress” or “Waiting”.

  • Tasks overdue - Tasks linked to the Opportunity (or Lead, if you’re using as a Lead Fitness Indicator) are overdue. In order to define “Overdue”, you can select how many days past the Due Date makes a task overdue. This indicator is calculated only when each task has a Due Date. If Due Date is empty, this indicator is evaluated as fit.

  • Low email outreach - the calculation includes all Outgoing Emails that are linked with Opportunity Contacts, Opportunity Accounts and the Opportunity itself

  • Low engagement - the calculation includes all Incoming Emails that are linked with Opportunity Contacts, Opportunity Accounts and the Opportunity itself

  • Many Closing Date updates - this calculation takes the number of Closing Date changes from the Audit Log (View Changes) and compares that to the number defined by you in the rules

  • Moved to the previous step - this Indicator always compares if the Opportunity’s current step is further along in your process than the furthest opportunity sales step this Opportunity has ever reached

  • Ranking decrease - reviews if the Ranking probability has been reduced by different percentage amounts over set date ranges that you choose as the rules for this Indicator. For example, this Indicator will look at the current period as defined in the rules - e.g. Last Two Weeks - and, if there was a reduction of X% in that time as compared to the previous Two Weeks, the Indicator will be evaluated as true.

  • Sales cycle overdue - takes information from the field “Sales Cycle Length” and compares that to the number set in the rules

  • Sales step velocity overdue - takes information from the field “Days In Sales Step” and compares this value to the expected Pipeline Step Velocity as defined in the Admin Module>Pipelines for each sales step.

  • Value decrease - this Indicator works in the same way as Ranking Decrease but reviews if the Opportunity Value has been reduced by different percentages over the selected date ranges that you choose as the rules for this Indicator.

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.

Custom Fitness Indicators

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

Viewing Fitness for an Opportunity (or Lead)

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.

Drilling down into Fitness Indicators

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 ⤵

Using Fitness and Indicators in Filters, Reports and Dashboards

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 ⤵

Using Fitness in Automatizer Processes

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.

Setting up Opportunity Fitness Indicators (for Admins)

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)

Using Predefined (System) Indicators

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.

Adding Custom Indicators

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 ……

Setting up Lead Fitness Indicators

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.

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