This is the first in a series of blog posts on how to perform certain tasks in Salesforce.com, what traps and pitfalls to avoid and other Salesforce.com best practices. Stay tuned for more helpful guides, each focusing on specific issues, to run your Salesforce.com processes more effectively and efficiently. 

When a sales rep fails to close an opportunity or loses a deal, sales managers will invariably want to know why. A sales team can’t move forward and learn from its mistakes if individual reps don’t know what mistakes they are making in the first place. This is why having lost reasons set up in Salesforce is crucial. Managers need to make it mandatory for every rep to record a lost reason for every lost opportunity. Having a culture of recording loss reasons doesn’t give reps anywhere to hide when opportunities move to the lost stage, while providing sales managers with more insightful and detailed Salesforce reports. Learn how to easily set up lost reasons in Salesforce.

The first step is to set up your picklist of lost reasons for your sales reps to choose from. In Salesforce:

1) Click on “Setup” under your name.

2) Click on “Customize” under “App Setup,” then “Opportunities” and “Fields.” This screen gives you a chance to create “New” Opportunity Custom Fields and Relationships.

3) Specify the field type (“Picklist”), fill in the details of what values you want in your picklist (i.e. the lost reasons that are applicable to your sales team) 

4) Add this new picklist option to the appropriate reports and your team is now well on it’s way to specifying a reason for each lost opportunity. 

The next step is to coach your reps to add this small, but important, step to their sales process. For starters, make this a mandatory field in Salesforce. Set up the CRM so that reps cannot save opportunity details or move on to the next one until a lost reason has been specified. Impress upon them the critical nature of recording a specific reason for each lost opportunity. 

Make sure to choose the right lost reasons for your picklist as well. “Can’t contact” and “None” are bad reasons that indicate laziness on the part of your sales reps in not pursuing or qualifying the opportunity well enough, or in failing to discern a specific lost reason from the contact. Additionally, implement a close lost detail box for reps to add more specifics. Every lost reason within the picklist – but especially for vague reasons such as “Other” – should be supported with more details. Sales managers who are armed with more in-depth information on why reps are losing deals will be better positioned to coach and coax improvements from them. 

Having a normalized list of lost reasons in Salesforce is an essential element of sales coaching and analytical sales management. When sales managers go to their won/lost reports, they can visualize an overview of all lost opportunities, or segment by specific lost reasons.  This information can drive better business decisions for many different teams within the organization.

Sales managers will be able to coach their reps more efficiently and effectively. The product team will gain instant feedback on what areas they might need to improve in. C-level executives could gain insights into whether they are selling to the right market, or if they have the right price point. Setting up lost reasons in Salesforce is a simple process that can lead to critical insights that touch every team in a company.