Our organization has recently migrated from Raiser’s Edge to Salesforce and I can’t find a place to track Prospect Status (e.g. qualification, cultivation, etc.). It seems the entire relationship management lifecycle is tracked on the opportunity. Do you have any recommendations on where/how to track this?
This is something I’ve heard many times. Some organizations prefer to track everything on the opportunity, but many organizations I’ve worked with prefer to use separate fields to track the Prospect Status (overall status of the relationship) and the Opportunity Status (more detailed report of the status of this ask). If you are still working with your Salesforce implementation consultant, you should ask them to create a new field on the Account (Household) record for tracking the Prospect Status. I also recommend creating a read-only field on the Contact record that displays the Household Prospect Status on all contacts in the household. With that, I would also recommend updating the Opportunity Status so that relationship management statuses prior to solicitation are not used to avoid confusion and be more specific to the ask. Example values could include Strategy Development (or some pre-solicitation value), Asked/Pending, Accepted (Closed Won) and Declined (Closed Lost). Feel free to leave a comment below if you’d like to discuss more!
We’re ready to invest in your success. Are you?
