Link: Stuck Opps card
Overview: Number of Opportunities that have remained in the same stage for the duration of a given timeframe.
Why it’s important: This card tells you which opportunities you may need to dig into a little deeper during your pipeline reviews, to uncover why they’ve gotten stuck. It may be that a deal isn’t going anywhere and closing it out will give the AE who owns that deal more time to spend on more promising opportunities. It also may be that an AE, or the team as a whole, tends to get stuck in the same stage, and there are coaching opportunities to focus on the skills required to advanced opportunities from that stage.
Who it’s useful for: AEs and their managers, AMs and their managers.
Definition: This card shows the count of opportunities where the Probability of that opportunity has not increased during a given timeframe. For a historical time period, the card shows opportunities that stayed at the same probability for the given timeframe at any point during that time period. In this way, it’s kind of the opposite of the Opportunities Advanced card, showing which opps have stayed in the same stage instead of those that have advanced. Like the Untouched Opps card, the SLA can be changed from 60 days when you are in the detailed card view, so that you can see how many opps have been in the same stage for other amounts of time. Additionally, if you’re using this card to look at historical time periods, you will see the stage at which the opportunity was stuck. I call that out because that will often be different from the opportunity’s current stage.
What data is used?: Opportunity data from SFDC. Fields used include Opportunity Owner, Probability (to determine stage movement), and opportunity created and closed dates.
Alerting: Alerting on this card looks at the number of new business opportunities that are stuck currently and compares that number to the AE’s historical average and to the average of the AE’s peers. Alerts will fire if the AE’s count of stuck opps is significantly higher or lower than his trailing 13 week average, or higher or lower than the peer average. The goal alert on this card compares the current number of stuck opportunities to the goal to determine whether the rep is achieving that goal.
Back of Card: The back of this card shows, for each stuck opportunity, the Opportunity Name, the Opportunity Stage, the number of days that the opportunity has been in that stage, and the Opportunity Type.
How to use it: The Stuck Opportunities card calls out opportunities that may need additional support or may have gone dark, and adds alerting to let the manager know this proactively. A rep may have a large pipeline but a high number of stuck opportunities, meaning that a portion of that pipeline may be at-risk, which is important information for forecasting and for understanding pipeline health.
An Important Note: This card can reflect confusingly as it will always reflect the stage the Opportunity became stuck. This means that the Opportunity may move laterally, or backwards, but will continue to reflect the stage it became stuck and filter for this stage even though it reflects an alternate stage.