Guide Salespeople Through Best Practices

Use the Guidance feature to create guidances that guide salespeople through best sales practices for different sales situations. In the current release, you can provide recommended steps for sales lead qualification and for closing deals in opportunities.

For leads, you specify the different steps required to take an unqualified lead to different statuses: to qualified, to converted, and to retired. The guidance is divided into guidance stages, one for each status.

For opportunities, you create the guidance to guide salespeople through the different sales stages of a sales method. Each opportunity must be associated with a sales method, a separate feature that you must set up as a prerequisite. The sales stages provide the structure for the guidance. In the guidance setup UI, the sales stages are called guidance stages.

For each guidance stage, you specify what information the salesperson needs to provide and what actions they need to take to move the opportunity to the next stage. You can also provide automated steps that take actions behind the scenes and follow up when things don't go as planned. For example, you can automatically send a follow-up email if a customer doesn't respond when a salesperson contacts them.

You can use guidance step templates to efficiently create and edit guidances. Step templates lets you build cadence flows that leverages the best practices in the industry. This saves time when creating and rolling out your guidances.

The guidance steps recommend actions to complete a set of goals that you define. You can specify if a step is required or not. For example, you can allow salespeople to mark a step as "completed" or allow them to click "skip" to move to the next step.

Although experienced salespeople can skip the recommended steps or mark them as complete, you shouldn't think of a guidance as a check list because the guidance can suggest a whole slew of remedial steps. Guidances represent the best practices to achieve specific goals such as contacting customers and closing the deal.

Past guided sales processes, such as Sales Coach, provided only a single set of linear recommendations. Guidances, by contrast, can have multiple branches to suggest different actions when a particular step in the sales process does or doesn't succeed. For example, you can prompt the salesperson to call the customer with the click of a button. If the salesperson reaches the customer, the process guides them to set up an appointment to discuss the sales proposal. If the salesperson can't contact the customer, the guidance waits for a day, and then prompts the salesperson to make a follow-up call. Guidance also improves on previous guided processes by supporting Smart Actions, an extensible framework for creating actions. For more information, see Overview of Smart Actions.