The Next Step for 'Next Step'

Salesforce provides a standard 255 character Next Step field. For many sales reps on the go, this is plenty. It could be as simple as 'Schedule call with CMO...' It provides a little more color than a Sales Stage.

One of the very first things done on the 'Next Step' field is enabling History Tracking to help them see what was there before.  And users can see the previous values in the Opportunity Field History related list.  This history table is also reportable but since the table has so many entries, performance may suffer.

For a sales professional with 5 to 10 active deals at a time, noting down next steps may not be as useful, especially if he or she has good memory. But it also helps his manager see what the next steps are without having to call him.  For sales professionals that have 20 or more active opportunities, logging next steps is essential.

As an administrator, the simplest View to provide sales teams would be 'My Opportunities with No Next Steps' so that they can start filling them out.  That would be pretty straightforward with a criteria of Next Steps equal to '':

We can add other criteria like Closed equals FALSE as above to show just open opportunities.

But of course, once the sales person has filled out all his next steps for all his opportunities, the View becomes useless.  New items will pop up in the list only when new opportunities are added and Next Step was blank.

Making the field required on the page layouts will also help minimize having blank 'Next Step' fields.  But again, after they are all filled out, a sales person will forget to update them.

So what is the next step for 'Next Step'?

What we need is a time stamp to capture when Next Step was last updated.  This way users can have a view (and a report) of open opportunities whose Next Step has not been updated in the last x days.  We will have to determine with sales management what is an acceptable lag between updates, taking into consideration the sales cycle and the market we are selling into.

So how do we capture the date and time when Next Step is updated?

We need a Workflow Rule that checks if Next Step is changed.  The ISCHANGED formula is very handy in this situation:

ISCHANGED (  NextStep )

Make sure that the Evaluation Criteria evaluated every time the record is 'created, and every time it’s edited.'

We will also need a new Field Update on a new field, say 'Next Step Last Modified', and set it to 'NOW()'.  It is always a good idea to set this new field to Read Only for all profiles to maintain its  integrity.

This field update will be the only action on the workflow rule.  Once it's activated, each change to the Next Step field will trigger the workflow and capture the current date and time in the new field.

The new View would look something like this:

Note the use of 'LAST 60 DAYS'.  This link provides more information: Salesforce Date Literals.  If the link becomes obsolete, simply use Google to search for 'Salesforce Date Literals'.

In recent years, Salesforce has allowed field updates to reevaluate workflow rules.  It may be possible to add a time-based email alert 30 days later to remind the opportunity owner to update the Next Step on his opportunity.  We will explore this exercise in the future.