High Level Summaries in Opportunities

Hoping folks have run into a similar issue or have some advice,

My sales director would like to be able to view the latest update on opportunities and has directing the sales team to put their notes in a text box I set up as the description of the project in the form.

My concerns are they are adding a LOT of text here - so its not easier to read in a view or a report, and they keeping adding additional notes here with the date as a break in the text, so they keep getting longer and longer. And they aren’t creating notes in the timeline when they do this.

Has anyone else been asked for anything similar? To share a high level summary of where several projects are at once, and if so how did you do it?

Right now I am thinking about creating a custom field that always shares the pin note from the timeline and asking sales to put those kind of updates there. But I want to know if there is anything simpler I haven’t thought of yet, or just a best practice I should ask them to follow.

I would advise against having the sales team add notes to open text boxes. There are Status fields you could utilize to build charts for Opportunities. You can use “stages” or the Business Process Flow to build reporting showing what stage each Opp is in and within each stage you could have a status note there.

Thanks Tim -
We definitely have a business process flow set up, and working on reporting. Our CRM went live in March for this team, and they had just used excel files to manage oppty. So I feel like this is bad habits from those days. Which I am trying stop.

I like how you called these status fields. That does help me in crafting that language on why this is a bad habit. I just need to come up with something to replace it with.

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