Understand Pipeline Health with Metrics and Charts
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand how the pipeline metrics groups measure pipeline health and track forecasts.
- Use charts to illustrate your pipeline health.
Pipeline Inspection provides what you need to achieve your forecast numbers: a convenient way to gauge your sales pipeline’s health. Use inline editing to update your pipeline quickly and view your metrics in ways that suit your workflow. And then gain insights into where they fit within your sales team’s broader sales strategy with a pair of informative (and colorful!) charts. Let’s see how the metrics in Pipeline Inspection offer more than just numerical data.
Use Metrics to Measure Your Pipeline Health
You can assess your pipeline by choosing from two main groups of metrics: Forecast categories and pipeline changes.
The default view shows amounts in your preferred currency. Click an amount to filter the opportunities that contribute to that total. You can also select other fields to summarize the metrics, based on what your Salesforce admin configured. For example, admins can set up Quantity, Expected Revenue, or any custom currency or number field.
Let’s take a closer look at each metric group.
Forecast Categories
To view your pipeline based on forecast category metrics, select Showing Forecast Categories from the dropdown menu at the top of the Pipeline Inspection page. These metrics indicate the level of confidence that a deal will close in the period and are controlled by the deal stage. As you advance deals through stages, the forecast categories update.
Metrics in forecast categories include:
- Total
- Closed Won
- Commit
- Most Likely (optional)
- Best Case
- Open Pipeline
- Closed Lost
Depending on your org’s configuration, opportunities can roll up into a single category or cumulatively. For example, in the first case, the Commit category shows only deals in Commit. In the second case, the Commit category shows deals that are in Commit or Closed Won status.
Pipeline Changes
To view the metrics in pipeline changes, from the dropdown menu at the top of the Pipeline Inspection page, select Showing Pipeline Changes. These categories represent what happened to deals in the pipeline over the selected time period. Categories include:
- Open Pipeline
- New
- Won
- Increased
- Moved In
- Moved Out
- Decreased
- Lost
- Overdue
When you filter the view by Increased and Decreased metrics, the Pipeline Changes metrics display a Change field in the opportunity list. The Change field tells you how much the opportunity changed value over the selected time period.
Let’s look at a fictional scenario to understand how these metrics groups work.
Sales manager Valerie at Get Cloudy Consulting wants to ascertain how many new opportunities Jeff, one of her sales reps, has logged this quarter. Because she is currently on the forecast metrics screen, she clicks the dropdown menu at the top of the Pipeline Inspection page and selects Showing Pipeline Changes. She then applies quick filters to select a close date of This Quarter, the name of her sales rep from the Owner field, and changes since the Start of the Period. Clicking on the New field allows her to view Jeff’s new opportunities for that chosen time frame.
Charts
But that’s not all! The Chart tab offers a high-level view of your sales team’s pipeline health. These charts show the changes in opportunities for the different sets of metrics categories over time. From there, you can filter results to focus on the most pertinent data.
Pipeline Inspection lets you visualize what’s happening to the pipeline with two integrated charts.
-
Waterfall chart: This chart shows how your pipeline has changed over time and what happened to the deals in the pipeline.
-
Flow chart: This chart shows what happened to the deals in your forecast, such as which deals went from Committed to Closed Lost.
To access these charts, click on the Chart tab. Select Showing Pipeline Changes from the Metrics dropdown menu to view the waterfall chart. To see the flow chart, select Showing Forecast Categories.
You may have one or both chart options in your org.
Let’s look at these two charts in greater detail.
Chart Your Pipeline Changes
The waterfall chart gives insights into changes in pipeline categories such as newly created opportunities, increases and decreases in your pipeline, amounts won and lost, and amounts for opportunities moved in and out of a chosen time frame. You specify the opportunities to view using the quick filters for close date, user, and a select period of time.
The chart data illustrates the net change to Open Pipeline throughout the chosen time frame. The bar at the beginning of the chart shows the Open Pipeline value at the start of the chosen time frame, while the bar at the end shows the Open Pipeline value today. The boxes in between show what happened to your pipeline to cause the change.
Let’s join a Get Cloudy Consulting sales team meeting to see the waterfall chart in action. Valerie shares with her team how the pipeline has changed since the beginning of the quarter. She sees that the pipeline decreased significantly due to deals being pushed out of the quarter. She clicks the Moved Out metric to see which opportunities were pushed.
Now, let’s move on to the flow chart.
Chart Your Forecast Categories
The flow chart provides a visual representation of what has happened to the deals in your forecast, such as deals that went from Committed to Closed Lost. Similar to the pipeline changes metrics and the waterfall chart, the flow chart reflects the change in opportunity forecast categories based on your filter criteria, which you easily set using the quick filters.
The chart shows changes from the date you specify to the current date. By clicking the relevant band in the chart, you can focus on changes associated with a particular forecast category, such as New, Closed Won, Pipeline, and Moved Out. The list below the chart then updates to display opportunities related to your selection.
Valerie needs to provide an update to the Get Cloudy Consulting leadership team regarding the company’s sales performance. To do so, she uses the quick filters to select a close date of the past month, reviews the pipeline for each of her sales reps, and assesses their sales activities over the preceding week. Using this filter criteria, Valerie uses the flow chart to review opportunities for her sales rep Jeff and sees that some of his deals moved from Commit to Closed Lost. By clicking that bar to see which opportunities fell out of the forecast, she can discuss in her next one-on-one with Jeff.
What’s Next?
Now you’ve seen how Pipeline Inspection’s charts can enhance your understanding of pipeline changes and forecast categories metrics. In the final unit of this module, we show you how Einstein insights and opportunity scores can help you quickly gauge the likelihood of a deal closing on time.