Table of Contents

1. Close Date
2. Deal Owner
3. Deal Stage
4. Total Amount
5. Professional Services
6. License Fees
7. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
8. Customer or Prospect
9. OpEx or CapEx
10. Term Length
11. Products & Services
12. Deal Naming Convention
13. Associated Contacts
14. Associated Companies
15. Associated Campaigns

1. Close Date

This, along with numbers 2-4 below, are probably obvious, but they are absolutely essential to capture, which is why they are on this list. Deal close date lets us know when opportunities are expected to close, helps to forecast future revenue, enables us to understand sales trends by month, quarter, & year, and can help to prioritize deals based on said dates. Furthermore, once deal are won, close date in your B2B CRM enables you to track when contracts were signed.

2. Deal Owner

When we track deal owner, it keeps reps accountable for the sale. It also lets the entire team know who is responsible. Furthermore, this data enables us to report on current pipeline and closed sales against quota by sales rep.

3. Deal Stage

Just about every B2B CRM has deal stage as an out of the box field. There is a reason for this: it’s essential to track.

When we monitor deal stages, it allows us to gain a clear view of where our opportunities are in the sales pipeline, analyze historical data on deal progression to understand how long deals take to close, and establishes accountability among sales team members because it provides a transparent record of everyone’s progress.

In the near future, we will have an entire post about how to optimize your B2B CRM deal stages. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out. For today, I want us to focus on one key aspect of deal stages:

Lost vs. Qualified Out

Many systems only track if deals are won or lost. However, it’s important to recognize the difference between a deal that is lost vs. one that is qualified out. This is important because it helps us to recognize what truly happened with a deal.

Lost

A lost deal refers to a qualified opportunity that ultimately does not result in a successful sale. This can be a loss to competition or a loss to a no decision (i.e. the prospect decided to buy from no one). When you mark a deal as lost, it also helps to track the reason so you can identify areas for improvement and gain insights into customer objections or market challenges. You might want to consider a second field for when a deal is lost to get that extra detail. Those reasons could be due to a wide variety of factors, but here are 5 key loss reasons:

Price

It’s possible that your offering costs too much for your prospect. Please note that sometimes price is presented too soon; before key problems and goals were identified, and the value of the product was truly established. This sort of loss is not necessarily due to price, but could be attributed to Sales (see below).

Product

Perhaps the product doesn’t fit the prospect’s needs.

Service

It’s possible that a prospect needs a vendor that offers 24/7 service in English, Spanish, and Chinese. 

Sales

While few would admit this, sometimes the reason for a loss is due to the selling process. Perhaps the rep pushes to close the deal before the buyer is ready. Perhaps the rep has their VP join the call and they do something to irk the customer. Wins can certainly be due to a rep’s skill, but a loss can be on them as well.

Relationship

Sometimes buyers want to deal with people they know and with whom they have done business with in the past. 

Other

Think about your business and the reasons as to why deals are lost. Add those reasons to a “Loss Reason” field and start to capture that data immediately.

Qualified Out

On the other hand, “qualified out” refers to deals that have been deliberately disqualified early in the sales process either by you or the buyer. This could be due to budget constraints, misalignment with the prospect’s needs, the absence of a genuine opportunity, or any similar reasons mentioned in the Lost section above. 

When you qualify out deals as early as possible, sales teams can focus their efforts on prospects with more promise and avoid time waste on deals with little-to-no potential.

Lost vs. Qualified Out Summary

When you distinguish between “lost” and “qualified out,” you can properly analyze and learn from failures and allocate resources more efficiently in the future towards opportunities with real promise. 

4. Total Amount

This is probably an obvious one, but it’s absolutely essential to capture the total value of your deals. This should also include the breakdown of that total figure. Let’s see in numbers 5, 6, and 7 below.

5. Professional Services

If the deal is associated with delivering a professional service, capture the details of the service provided. This includes both a field for the name of the service provided if there are multiple offerings, and a value to said services.

6. License Fees

If your company sells licenses as part of a CapEx deal (more on that below), then you likely want to track that data in your CRM. 

7. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Record the amount of revenue generated by the deal on an annual basis. For many companies, this is the essential figure that management tracks, so you want to ensure that this is captured and perfectly accurate; especially for all closed deals.

8. Customer or Prospect

It’s important to capture whether a deal comes from a current customer or a prospect. This helps you to get a good understanding of where your business comes from. With this data, you can track the:

• Number of new logos added to your business each year
• Number of upsells
• Amount of ARR from new vs. existing customers
• Amount of professional services from new vs. existing customers
• Total number of deals created for new vs. existing customers

All of this helps you to understand where your reps create the most deals, close the most deals, and spend their time in general. From this, you may find out if your team needs to allocate more effort to upsells or more time on the hunt for new logos.

9. OpEx or CapEx

It’s a great idea to differentiate deals between operational (OpEx) or capital (CapEx) expenditures. Here is a link to a site that explains the topic if you’re unfamiliar. This data:

• Helps our finance teams perform revenue recognition
• Enables us to easily filter and sort between OpEx and Capex
• Allows us to compare recently won deals to see if our customers have a preference for OpEx or CapEx; pending our product can be sold as either
• Helps us to see the impact on cash flow. CapEx deals generally mean a higher upfront cost to the customer with less ongoing revenue as compared to an OpEx deal, which usually has a lower upfront cost and a higher ARR. Thus, CapEx generally means more cash now vs. OpEx means a more even spread of incoming cash year over year.
• For a more fulsome explanation of OpEx and CapEx, check out Investopedia

10. Term Length

It’s essential to capture the length of every deal because this information can help us forecast future sales and renewals. This data along with Professional Services, License Fees, and ARR helps us to understand the expected cash flow. This in turn helps to forecast the budget.

11. Products & Services

Deal data would not be complete without the products and/or services we all sell. It’s vital to capture this data so we can see which customers have which products and services. 

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Numbers 12 – 15

While the subsequent 4 items are not fields, they are extraordinarily important to capture in a B2B CRM, which is why they are in this list.

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12. Deal Naming Convention

Deal Name

While you know that every system enables users to input a name for deals, you may not know that we should have a deal naming convention. This is a standardized way to name every single deal that enters our system. But why?

Clear and Consistent

A good naming convention ensures that deals are easy to identify and helps avoid confusion.

Organized and Structured

An organized naming convention makes it easy to sort, search for, and report on deals.

Specific and Descriptive

Descriptive naming conventions helps us to quickly identify the type of each deal.

Example & Further Explanation

Naming convention should be based on the various factors that are important to your company, and to how you target and sell your products or services.

Example: ABC Company – Product 1 – United States

In this example, we used: company name – product name – country

This shows that the key details when I look up a deal are the name of the associated company, the product, and the country where the deal occurs. In my search for a deal, I can type in any of those three pieces to net the result I seek. Naming conventions do not have to be long and complex; just capture the essentials and make sure the team knows to repeat this for each new deal.

13. Associated Contacts

While this isn’t exactly a field, your CRM should enable you to associate contacts to your deals; something your team should do. It’s important because we want to:

• Identify decision makers and influencers associated with deals
• Track their role and engagement
• Link additional contact details and perhaps even social media activity
• Know who the key contacts are in the event the rep leaves your company

14. Associated Companies

Much like associated contacts, this is not a field, but it is essential. Companies should be added to deals to ensure:

• We know which companies have active, won, and lost deals
• Our team members do not reach out to a company where a deal is already in progress with another rep
• We can do cross object reporting so we don’t have to recapture company data in deals such as industry, country, state, etc.
• That when multiple deals close over time for one company, we can see how many wins and losses we have with said company
• We can go into the associated company after a deal is won, and easily update their lifecycle stage to customer/client. This way, you can have a list of all your customers on the company object.

15. Associated Campaigns

It’s essential to tie campaigns to deals to:

• Understand the marketing source for each deal
• Track the ROI of each campaign through the deals that get created, won, and lost
• Store relevant documentation and content associated with each campaign. When reps can see associated campaigns, they can use that information to start conversations, figure out buyers’ intent, and begin to understand their goals.

Wrap Up

I can say with full confidence that we all want to know what goes on in our organizations. With all of this data, we can dissect deals, understand trends, make better decisions, develop more effective sales strategies, budget better than before, and drive revenue growth. 

Talk with your team about the importance of these essential deal fields and begin to track this data as soon as possible.