USE CASE: Ensuring Reasons Lost Are on Closed Salesforce Opportunities

Problem: The reasons for losing a prospect aren’t listed on the Opportunity record

Losing an Opportunity can be an unpleasant experience. The instinct is to move on quickly and focus on other promising Opportunities. However, that would be a mistake. Time must be used to create a complete and comprehensive record of the engagement.

By not doing that, you are losing more than the Opportunity, but also the ability to re-engage that customer in the future using valuable information and lessons learned. Information and lessons can also translate into better engagements with other prospects. Plus, feedback is useful from an internal perspective in making changes and innovations in how the company goes to market in general.

Solution: Automatically warn the Salesforce user to include all background information when an Opportunity is lost

Using the Free Edition of the Data Quality Helper app, an Admin can easily create hard or soft validation rules to address various situations and inform users of the required or desired elements.

Salesforce default functionality only allows hard validation rules—if records are not properly created/updated, the save/submit is prevented. With the added functionality of Data Quality Helper, Admins have more flexibility to design unique validation rules that better serve organization goals across a number of situations, beyond this missing Closed Lost reasons example. In addition, Admins can craft warning messages, customized by content and formatting. Finally, the app can provide a list view of all new and existing records with unresolved data validation issues—making future data cleanup easier. (Check out the Data Quality Helper Admin Guide for step-by-step instructions on how to set up validation rules.)

In this particular use case, the Admin has chosen to use a soft validation rule and customized warning empowering the Salesforce user to make a decision on how to proceed.

This warning says: “This Opportunity was set to Closed Lost without any reasons given. Feedback for why it was lost is important!”

Ideally, you want all the information you can get, but in some cases not having it may not be worth the cost of not being able to close the Opportunity (like with Salesforce’s default hard validation). The choice whether to use this app’s soft or hard validation is an Admin and organizational decision.

The good news is that, with Data Quality Helper, unresolved validation issues remain attached to the record. They aren’t one-time-only and just disappear. So it serves as a reminder to add the missing information later.

Besides enhanced data validation, this app also offers duplicate data detection and resolution that exceeds default Salesforce functionality. Plus, don’t forget to take advantage of the list view that shows all validation and duplication issues detected by the rules Admins created. Install the free version today!