Sometimes you don’t lose a sale, it simply goes stale. What’s important is to be aware of these stale opportunities and put plans in place to reinvigorate them or close the opportunity. We've just released a new stale opportunities feature to help make sure you're on top of things.
Stale Opportunities
You'll now see a new orange highlight whenever there hasn't been any contact made on an opportunitiy for a number of days. Opportunities highlighted are now classed as 'stale opportunities'.
You can see how long an opportunity hasn’t been contacted for by hovering over the opportunity in the pipeline or on the opportunity list page.
Video showing hovering over stale opportunities on the opportunities list
The number of days before an opportunitiy goes stale is defined for each individual milestone. We've defaulted the 'Days Until Stale' duration to 14 days. This can easily be changed in your account settings under 'Opportunities' and then selecting the milestone.
You can also see if an opportunity is stale when you’re viewing an opportunity on the opportunitiy view page itself.
Logging an activity on an opportunity will update the last contacted date, which will take the opportunity out of it's stale state. The hope is you'll make contact with your potential customer and log the activity such as a meeting, call or even forward a new email conversation. All of these will update the last contacted date.
If you use custom activity types these may not update the last contacted date unless they are configured to do so. A good idea is to Create Tracks that can be applied to stale opportunities to help get them out of a stale state. There's also a new 'is stale' list filter so you can create lists of stale opportunities to organize your team to make contact with stale opportunities.
If you don’t want to use this feature or aren’t ready yet, clearing the stale periods for each milestone will stop marking the opportunities as stale. But why not give it a go and see how it can help keep your opportunities moving through the pipeline.
We hope you enjoy these latest updates. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or questions.
