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CRM 4.0 Pipeline Report and the Sales Process

April 29, 2008

I was working on the pipeline report today and trying to figure out how it's affected by the sales process.  What wasn't clear which how sales stages show up on the pipeline report.  To identify exactly how it works, I created a test sales process with two stages and then created several opportunities and walked them through the stages.

What I found out is that the Sales Stages that show up on the pipeline report are the description from each stage in a multistage opportunity workflow (sales process) and are only created from the sales process.  If your opportunity has not been driven by a multistage workflow, the sale stage will always be unspecified in the pipeline report.  It doesn’t matter what you put into the Pipeline Phase field of the opportunity because that has nothing to do with the Sales Pipeline report, and it just used to display in the bottom right-hand of the opportunity form.

Here’s an example of my test sales process (note the names used to describe stage one and stage two in the sales process):

image

Here is the corresponding Pipeline report. Notice the "Test Sales Process" at the top & stage names at the bottom.

image 

There are several attributes in the Opportunity entity  that appear to be related to this:

  • stepname (Pipeline phase): Displayed in bottom right corner of opportunity Form
  • salesstagecode (Process code):Picklist out-of-the-box with only one value - "Default value" I’m not sure where this is actually used.
  • stepid (Step): This attribute of type uniqueidentifier is entitled "unique identifier of the step in the sales process". You can’t access it in a view, nor can you add it to the form, but I believe that this is the data attribute used by the sales pipeline form. I haven’t had a chance to look into the pipeline report to see if this is actually what it does but if somebody wants to let me know about that I would certainly be grateful.

I hope that clarifies things for you.

Have a great day,

Stephen Noe

Posted by Steve Noe on 04/29 at 04:55 PM
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