According to a 2015 Harvard Business Review study, companies that define a formal Sales Process achieve an 18% higher revenue growth than companies that do not. However, simply defining a formal process is only as good as the sales reps that follow the process. Once a formal process is in place companies must invest time to ensure its being followed properly, and more importantly that it stays finely tuned.

To maximize sales team efficiency, sales operations need to analyze each phase of the process from prospecting to negotiation. Are deals moving smoothly? Where are the bottlenecks? What’s happening to speed or slow down closing? And, finally, what actions should they take on the opportunities that are at risk?

With the new Sales Stage Analysis dashboard in Sales Wave, it’s never been easier to quickly identify and clear bottlenecks in your sales process by looking at how long deals spend in each stage.

Start by comparing days spent across different stages in the sales process. This helps identify stages that cause longer deal cycles. You can also view historical averages to be able to benchmark stage time accurately.

While it’s important to look at how long deals spend in a stage, it’s also crucial to know which sales reps follow the team’s typical sales process. The Sales Stage dashboard provides a great way to do that: Click a stage, and the dashboard shows deals that moved out of that stage. This lets you see if deals follow the standard sales process, and if some sales reps skip stages and move deals to close; this also helps pinpoint which reps may need additional coaching.

Next, you can identify at-risk opportunities across different categories: opportunities that are neglected, stalled, or pushed. Once you identify an opportunity, you can take CRM actions such as creating a new task or updating the opportunity right from the dashboard.

In summary, this dashboard gives a clear picture of sales data to provide answers to questions like:

• What’s the average time a deal spends in each stage of the sales process?
• How many opportunities do I have at each stage of the process?
• What opportunities are either stalled or being neglected?
• What’s the probability of closing in each sales stage?
• Where is the process most efficient and where is it broken?

As with the other Sales Wave Analytics dashboards, Sales Stage Analysis gives actionable insights from Sales Cloud data to help create a winning sales team.

Learn more about the Sales Wave Analytics app.