Table of Contents

1. Close Date

This, along with numbers 2 & 3 below, are probably obvious, but they are absolutely essential to capture, which is why they are on this list. Deal close date helps to know when opportunities are expected to close, helps to forecast future revenue, enables you to understand sales trends by month, quarter, & year, and can help you to prioritize deals based on expected close dates. Furthermore, once a deal is won, the close date in your CRM enables you to track when the contract was 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 representative.

3. 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 4, 5, and 6 below.

4. 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 Dollar/Euro/Pound value to said services.

5. 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. 

6. 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 for all won deals.

7. 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 new ARR from new customers 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 spend more time with upsells or more time on the hunt for new logos.

8. 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 can:

• Help your finance team perform revenue recognition
• Your products and services, depending on what they are, may be required by law to be sold as either CapEx or OpEx (I’m not an attorney – consult one for guidance on the topic). If you have products that can be sold as both, this enables you to easily filter and sort between the two expenditures.
• Compare recently won deals to see if your customers have a preference for OpEx deals or CapEx; pending your product can be sold as either. 
• Help you to see the impact on your 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 what is OpEx and CapEx, check out Investopedia.

9. Term Length

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

10. Products & Services

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

11. Lost vs. Qualified Out (& Reasons)

Many systems only track if a deal is won or lost. However, it’s important to recognize the difference between a deal that is lost vs. one that is qualified out because it enables 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 helps to also track the reasons for failure 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 your 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. Sometimes win comes purely because of the rep and sometimes a loss is because of them as well.

Relationship

Sometimes buyers want to deal with people they know and 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 more prospects with more promise and avoid time waste on deals with low 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. 

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Numbers 12 – 15

While the subsequent 4 items aren’t exactly fields, they are extraordinarily important to capture in a 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 your deal, you may not know that you should have a deal naming convention. This is a standardized way to name every single deal that enters your 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 easier to sort, search for, and report on deals.

Specific and Descriptive

Descriptive naming conventions help you quickly identify the type and status of each deal.

Example & Further Explanation

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

Ex. 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 results I seek. Naming conventions don’t 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. Furthermore, your team should actually associate contacts to deals. It’s important because you want to:

• Identify decision makers and influencers associated with the deal
• 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 isn’t exactly a field, but it is essential. You should add companies to your deals to ensure:

• Know which companies have active, won, and lost deals. You definitely do not want a sales rep to reach out to a company where a deal is already in progress with another rep.
• You can do cross object reporting so you don’t have to recapture company data in your deals; such as industry, country, state, etc.
• That when multiple deals close over time for one company, you can see how many wins and losses you have with said company.
• You 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 the rep can see the associated campaign, they can often use that information to start conversations, figure out buyers’ intent, and understand their goals.

Wrap Up

I can say with full confidence that you and your team want to know what goes on in your business. With all of this data, you 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.