Close Date?

To a sales user who has used Saleseforce or Siebel or SAP CRM for quite a while, the term 'Close Date' on an Opportunity is not new.  But sometimes, to a person who does not encounter the term on a daily basis, the term is ambiguous.

So what is Close Date?  If the opportunity is still open, or in play, or active, it is a future date, or it is the "Expected Close Date".  And if the opportunity is already closed, it is the date when it was closed.

Depending on your sales process, it is usually when you receive the order from the customer, or when the order is booked in your order management application, or when the contract is signed.  If it will be fulfilled through a third party reseller, it could be when the point-of-sale information comes through.  That is, if you win the opportunity.

Salesforce.com does not automatically change the close date once an opportunity is closed.  And that is where some of the reporting and dashboards become skewed.  For example, a sales rep can reasonably expect something to close in January based on commitment from his customer.  But situations change and he needs more wins in December to meet his quota.  He convinces the customer to purchase in December and closes that opportunity early.  If he is not diligent enough to update the Close Date, a regular Win report will show that opportunity as being won in January, not December.

Similarly, if a sales rep has an early stage opportunity that he expects to close in June, he will put a  Close Date in June.  And if after further qualification or further discussion in February, he clearly sees that his product cannot answer the customer's needs, so he marks it as Lost.  That opportunity will be marked as Lost in June, not February.

If management is measuring Win/Loss ratio by quarter, then it may not be completely accurate if we rely on the standard Salesforce.com functionality.

It is relatively simple to update the Close Date when an opportunity is closed.  Create a Workflow Rule that will fire when the criteria: Opportunity: Closed equals True. 

And create a field update that will set the Opportunity Close Date to TODAY().  It is that simple.

Now, if for some reason, you want to keep what the rep originally entered, for example, to measure how accurate they predict the Close Date, you can instead update a read-only field called "Actual Close Date" to TODAY().  If you do measure accuracy of Close Date, you may still want to update the Close Date to today's date when an opportunity is Lost.  Measure only the accuracy of Won opportunities.  And of course, to see how far off the rep is, a formula that will subtract one from the other will be necessary.  Depending on your business, it may be acceptable to be in the same month, or the same week, not necessarily accurate to the day.

As always, evaluate what makes sense for your organization.