Customize Your Pipeline Inspection Experience

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Filter and optimize your pipeline views.
  
• Customize your pipeline to meet your needs.
  

“One size fits all” isn’t always useful—it doesn’t apply to your mattress or your clothing, and certainly not to your sales pipeline. We all work differently with different needs. That’s what makes Pipeline Inspection so effective. It allows you to create filters and views that cater to your individual and team needs throughout the sales process. In this unit, we show you how.

Vary Your View

While the default pipeline views are My Pipeline and My Important Opportunities, you can also create your own custom views. Then you can easily switch between all of them.

For example, let’s say you want to create a view for New Business Opportunities and another for Renewal Opportunities. Switching between the two involves one quick step: Click the dropdown arrow at the top of the page. From there, you can employ filters to precisely tailor the information you want to see. How? Read on.

Quick Filters

Quick filters offer a way to change your pipeline view without modifying your saved settings. Use the dropdown menus in the quick filters section to filter by close date, sales representative, team, or territory. Let’s look at these choices in more detail.

Let’s illustrate this with Valerie, a sales manager at the fictional company, Get Cloudy Consulting. Valerie wants to review her team’s pipeline for the quarter, focusing only on opportunities that have changed during that time. To filter the list, she selects a close date of This Quarter, designates My Team as the owner, and specifies changes since the Start of the Period. This streamlines the data and provides her with the precise insights she needs.

Filter by Metric

Pipeline Inspection metrics are key performance indicators tracked in sales pipelines. You can choose from various field types to summarize metrics your Salesforce admin configured. For example, use a currency field to review annual recurring revenue or a number field to assess product quantities. Sales teams can also view their pipelines using forecast categories or metrics that reveal changes over time.

We dig deeper into forecast categories and pipeline changes metrics in the next unit.

Let’s consider Valerie, our sales manager, who is worried about meeting her revenue targets this quarter. To determine the overdue revenue amount, she clicks on the appropriate pipeline metric to see a list of relevant opportunities. Now, she can quickly identify opportunities that can be closed to align with her forecasted revenue goals.

Customize and Save Your Pipeline View

We all have our regular work tasks. Your sales pipeline is no exception. With Pipeline Inspection, you can create and save custom filters and views for opportunities you reference frequently, so you don’t have to reconfigure your pipeline every time you visit. You have the flexibility to save multiple views and switch between them to easily access the information you need most. For example, you can set up lists for My New Deals Closing This Quarter, My Team’s Renewals Closing Next Quarter, and more. You’re in control!

Create Custom Filters and Saved Views

To create custom filters and saved views, click the gear icon to navigate its menu. Here, you can create, clone, rename, or delete pipeline views and change the field used to summarize pipeline metrics.

Click the filter panel button to access the side panel. Here, you can add custom filter criteria, such as accounts, amounts, and stages.

Add and Arrange Your Columns

You can select the columns you want to show in your Pipeline Inspection view. Arrange these columns by sorting in ascending or descending order, and dragging them into the order that best suits your workflow.

Filter by Important Deals

When you want to focus on your most valuable opportunities, mark these deals as high priority by clicking the important icon next to any opportunity. You can filter your view to display only important deals. These are visible only to you and can’t be shared with other users.

To see all your important opportunities in one place, there are two options.

1. Select the My Important Opportunities view from the pipeline views dropdown.
   
2. Click the important opportunities filter button to view this information in any other saved view.
   

For example, consider Jeff, a sales rep at Get Cloudy Consulting. He wants to review his important opportunities and clicks the important opportunities filter button. But his list needs one of his biggest clients, Cloud Atlas Services. Jeff searches for the opportunity and realizes he forgot to mark it as important. He clicks the opportunity’s important icon (3) and refilters his view by clicking the important opportunities filter button again. The client now appears on his list.

Coming Up

Now that you’ve seen the many options for customizing your sales pipeline in Pipeline Inspection, you’re one step closer to achieving your forecast numbers! In the next unit, we dive deeper into pipeline metrics groups and explore how you can visually chart your pipeline health.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Pipeline Inspection
  
• Salesforce Help: Managing Pipelines with Pipeline Inspection
  
• Video: Ensuring Sales Rep Accountability with Pipeline Inspection