Overview of Sales Methods, Sales Stages, and Sales Coach

You can use sales methods and sales stages to employ the sales methodology that best aligns with an opportunity.

Use Sales Coach, which administrators set up within sales stages, as both a teaching tool and a method to make your organization's best-practice information readily available to salespeople.

Sales Methods and Sales Stages

Sales methods are an opportunity attribute that link sales strategy to sales execution. For example, is the customer more interested in price, features, service, or delivery time? After you make these decisions, you can align your sales methods and sales stages to reflect these customer requirements. You can also use a different sales methodology for your price-conscious customers than for your customers who are interested in features. A sales method can include all activities associated with the different sales stages during the sales process, from qualifying, to negotiating, to closing.

The application comes with a few sales methods and associated sales stages. Administrators can modify the supplied sales methods and stages, or create new ones.

Sales Coach

Sales Coach is a virtual coach available to salespeople while they view or edit an opportunity. For example while viewing an opportunity, a salesperson will see Recommended Documents for the sales stage that his opportunity is in. He can download the Recommended Documents that his administrator has posted to help with the sale.

This table describes the tools available as part of sales methods and sales stages.

Tool	Description
Action items (called process steps in the setup UI)	Part of Sales Coach. Guides salespeople through an organization's sales best-practice processes for a particular sales stage.
Recommended documents	Part of Sales Coach. Provides coaching strategies and best-practice information in the form of documents, such as customer letter templates, relevant websites, and training materials.
Task templates	Provides a list of required or recommended tasks relevant to a particular sales stage. Recommended task templates are optional. Autogenerated task templates are automatically applied to your list of tasks for a particular sales stage, when the opportunity moves to that stage. Note that task templates aren't supported in the simplified UI.
Assessment templates	Helps salespeople analyze and score an opportunity attributes. After selecting an assessment type, salespeople enter a series of responses to achieve a weighted score. This score then helps determine the success rate of the opportunity.