In reviewing our team sales pipeline, I see that one of our sales reps has close dates for next week, next month or later in the fall. I read close as, contract signed and payment received. Am I correct? Should the date be the date our organization determines a sale is officially closed and not potentially closed?
Hi, @LynnMcG. The short answer to your question is no, it's not required. It's not really practical to leave close date blank on deals, especially if you're integrated with other supported solutions. (For example, if you're integrated with Salesforce, you'll run into sync errors, as Close Date is a required field on opportunities in Salesforce.)
The close date simply tries to represent, "When do we expect this currently-open deal will be completely closed, either as a win or a loss?" Your organization may have a slightly different definition, but it's something along those lines. You shouldn't be looking at still-open deals with close dates in the past, nor previously-closed deals with close dates in the future.
The close date isn't automatically tied to any deal stage changes, nor is a close date in the future necessarily indicative of a closed deal. Really, though, it's about how your organization wants to treat when close date is set/when a deal is completely closed. This is the kind of thing where the specific agreement doesn't matter nearly as much as everyone having the same agreement.
If you're looking at close dates and there's ambiguity, there may be ambiguity for other members of your team. Make sure everyone's aligned on when to set close dates, how far out they should be set, and when deals should ultimately be marked Closed Won/Closed Lost.
Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
Hi, @LynnMcG. The short answer to your question is no, it's not required. It's not really practical to leave close date blank on deals, especially if you're integrated with other supported solutions. (For example, if you're integrated with Salesforce, you'll run into sync errors, as Close Date is a required field on opportunities in Salesforce.)
The close date simply tries to represent, "When do we expect this currently-open deal will be completely closed, either as a win or a loss?" Your organization may have a slightly different definition, but it's something along those lines. You shouldn't be looking at still-open deals with close dates in the past, nor previously-closed deals with close dates in the future.
The close date isn't automatically tied to any deal stage changes, nor is a close date in the future necessarily indicative of a closed deal. Really, though, it's about how your organization wants to treat when close date is set/when a deal is completely closed. This is the kind of thing where the specific agreement doesn't matter nearly as much as everyone having the same agreement.
If you're looking at close dates and there's ambiguity, there may be ambiguity for other members of your team. Make sure everyone's aligned on when to set close dates, how far out they should be set, and when deals should ultimately be marked Closed Won/Closed Lost.
Brad Mampe, Salesforce Analyst, Fidelity I'm probably wrong. I may not be right about that.
One of the really annoying things with this is that this appears in the Deal Table by default. I cannot see a way of changing this so that its not there. Ideally i would like the Follow-up field to be there as thats how we work with the deal table. If there was a way to not show the close date or to set this to 30day from deal creation, this would be perfect.
