Including the following data elements will maximize the utility of opportunity pipeline reports for both salespeople and management:
Salesperson Name: This should be at the report header level for individual salesperson reports, and at the line item level for sales branch or company reports.
Company Name: This is the name of the prospect or customer company.
Project Name: Large and/or active accounts may have multiple opportunities in process at any point in time. Project Names can be used to distinguish multiple opportunities from each other. Plus, Project Names can be used to aggregate opportunities that consist of multiple line items.
Category (Optional): Some constituencies within a company may wish to look at specific subsets of the opportunity pipeline. For example, marketing teams in an information technology company may wish to separately examine opportunities for Hardware, Software, Services, etc.
Sub-Category (Optional): A company may also wish to subdivide specific Categories. For example, the Category “Hardware” could be subdivided into sub-categories such as Servers, Storage, Networking, etc.
Revenue: This is the gross revenue that an opportunity line item is expected to produce.
Gross Margin Percentage (Optional): If a company does not work from a fixed pricing schedule, it may wish to track the profitability of individual opportunity line items.
Gross Margin (Optional): If a company chooses to track the profitability of individual opportunity line items, it should calculate each line item’s gross margin contribution by multiplying Revenue by the Gross Margin Percentage.
Book Month: This is the month in which the sale is expected to close.
Ship Month (Optional): Sometimes booked orders can take weeks or months to ship (for example, if a product is on backorder). When this occurs, a company may wish to track both a Book Month and a Ship Month. This becomes especially pertinent if either revenue recognition or commissions are triggered by order shipment.
Confidence Percentage: This value identifies the likelihood of closing an order for the opportunity line item. For more information, see, “Assigning Confidence Percentages to Opportunities” later in this chapter.
Next Action Item: This should be a text field where the salesperson can enter a brief description of the next planned activity that will advance the opportunity toward closure.
Owner: This is the person or people who are responsible for completing the Next Action Item.
Due Date: This is the date when the Next Action Item is expected to be completed.
Status: This value identifies whether the opportunity line item has been Booked, Lost, or is still in process (Open).
Opportunity pipeline reports should be sorted first by Book Month or Ship Month, then by Status (showing Closed opportunity line items first, then Open line items; Lost line items should be listed last or on a separate report), then by Confidence Percentage, then by either Revenue or Gross Margin. When reports are sorted in this manner, report users can see at a glance (1) how much business has already been closed for the month; (2) the Open opportunities sequenced from those closest to closing to those furthest from closing; and (3) within each Confidence Percentage, the opportunities sequenced from largest to smallest in terms of Revenue or Gross Margin contribution.
Note to Management: If you want your salespeople to do a good job of updating opportunity records, there has to be something in it for them. One company I worked with couldn’t understand why their salespeople did such a poor job of updating opportunity records. Upon further questioning, I learned that the company did not make individual opportunity pipeline reports available to its salespeople! Since the salespeople did not benefit from performing opportunity updates, they considered the task to be a low priority. When the company made individual reports available to its salespeople, pipeline accuracy and the timeliness of updates improved dramatically.