Sales pipeline and reporting - capturing feedback

Hi everyone,

First time poster! I am looking to create a basic sales pipeline and reporting solution.

The basic template is lacking 2 key things and i am trying to workout a simple way to add them without making the solution clunky!

The people who will use the form are not IT savvy and if it looks too complex might well not use it.

As the sales state drop down changes we want to capture that date so we can get historical trend as it moves through the pipeline.

Secondly and really importantly we need to capture feedback for each stage of the pipeline as the prospect moves through.

The solution has to be easy for the user. At the moment i can't see another way except for multiple feedback columns and maybe an audit sheet if the sales stage changes. Doesnt look like forms can be used in this instance as it would be an update to a row?

Does anyone have any clever ideas how to make this more usable? Do I need to look at things like dynamic view to hide columns depending on sales stage?

Any advice appreciated! We are trying to keep this simple and easy to maintain.

Thanks!

Toby

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David Tutwiler

Welcome to the community Toby! I hope you find it to be as helpful as I have when I've needed solutions. I think you will find that the more you use Smartsheet the more you'll find there are at least 6 ways to do everything. But with your prompt about keeping it as simple as possible in mind, here's my idea on your two needs.

Stage Feedback - The most simple solution I can think of would be to utilize the Row Comments section. This would be a way for your sales folks to write, really anything they wanted to provide updates on the opportunity throughout the lifecycle of the sale. The great thing about using the Row Comment is that it records who made it, the information they typed out, and provides a time-stamp on the note. I have found it is a much more approachable way to keep up with notes than having free-form text columns.

Stage History - This one is slightly more complicated, but I think you could design it in a way where it presented as an easy solution. In the past, when I have needed to provide history on a sheet, I will set up a Copy Row automation. What this allows is for multiple copies of the same row on another sheet (let's call it a Pipeline History Sheet), but with a timestamp and updated status. If you create a report on that sheet that groups by Opportunity ID (or whatever your unique ID is), then you would see the full history of the opportunity as it changed status. Pair that with the "Modified Date" column and you get timestamps for every change.

I hope these solutions at least point you in the right direction. Feel free to @mention me if you have any other questions about what I talked about.

Georgie

Hi @Tobyha,

As David has said, there is often more than one way to achieve things in Smartsheet, so here are some more suggestions!

To capture the date each time the value in the Sales Stage dropdown column changes, you could use a Record a Date automation. I’d recommend adding a date column for each dropdown value in the Sales Stage column (eg “Date Stage changed to Proposal” and so on). Once you’ve got these columns set up, you can then create one automated workflow with multiple condition paths - see an example below:

For more on this, see this help article: Work with the Record a date action.

To capture feedback for each stage of the pipeline, I’d also suggest using the Comments feature. You could then add a Latest Comment column to the sheet, and you could create an update request workflow that sends out to the relevant users when the Sales Stage changes, and you can include the Comments field within the update request so that recipients can add comments - recipients of update requests don’t need to be shared to the sheet to make changes to it via the update request. Check out the following resources for more about comments and update requests:

Hope that helps!

Georgie

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