How to change your sales stages in a way that works best

Fullcast Performance has a variety of metrics that rely on opportunity stage information to help with sales performance management. 

These include metrics like Pipeline at Stage Reached, Stage Reached, Conversion from Stage, etc.

However, sometimes organizations would like to change their sales stages.

These are some recommendations to do that in a way that helps make sure that your historical performance data continues to be as useful as possible in Fullcast Performance. 

How Atrium Uses Stage Probabilities

New Stages and Their Probabilities

We have the same number of new stages and old stages

We have more new stages than old stages

We have fewer new stages than old stages

How Fullcast Performance Uses Stage Probabilities:

Fullcast Performance uses the "probability" value of a given stage to calculate various metrics as relates to stages. 

Stages and probabilities in Salesforce

So, as an example, when calculating how much pipeline has reached "Priorities Shared", above, Fullcast Performance would actually calculate how much pipeline value (e.g., the number of opps times the amount of pipe for each one) that has reached "24%". 

Similarly, when calculating the conversion rate out of "Priorities Shared", Fullcast Performance would actually be calculating the number of opportunities that were at "24%" that then converted to a higher percentage.

New Stages and their Probabilities:

Because of the above, when you're changing your stages, it's ideal to ensure that some new stages (with new names) correlate to the probabilities of the former stages. 

By doing this, when you select a "new" stage name in an Fullcast Performance metric card, it will select the same probability as the former, correlated stage, and preserve information for your use.

Selecting Stages in an Fullcast Performance Card

In this case, if we were changing out stages, we'd want to ensure that a new stage correlated to the same percentage of the prior stage. 

E.g., "Priorities Shared (24%)" to "Discovery (24%)"

In this case, the previous data for Priorities Shared (e.g., Pipeline at Staged Reached, Stages Reached, etc.) will still be accessible in the Fullcast Performance UI by selecting "Discovery". 

We have the same number of new stages and old stages:

In this case, just align the stages in the new regime that mean the same things (or as close as possible) to the percentages of the old stages.

We have more new stages than old stages:

In this case, align the new stages that match most closely to old stages and use the same probability. This will preserve historical data access. New stages assign a new probability of your choosing.

We have fewer new stages than old stages:

This is a little trickier, as you're going to have to choose old data to orphan.  In this case, for the new stages, choose the closest conceptual prior stage and align the probabilities.