If you’ve worked in Salesforce for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out that there are a lot of extra things you can buy to improve your Salesforce org. These add-ons come from Salesforce themselves or from third-party companies that have created features to improve on the standard capabilities. Many of these add-ons do a lot of cool things that Salesforce can’t do out-of-the-box, so sometimes they are necessary for your org.
In other cases, though, Salesforce has a free, out-of-the-box tool that you might not be aware of. In those instances, I think it’s always more economical to at least attempt to use the out-of-the-box feature before moving on to a paid add-on. One of the best examples of this scenario that I know of is Opportunity Historical Trending.
Use Case
For most businesses, the job of sales is to generate a pipeline and then turn it into actual revenue for the company. In line with this goal, all sales leaders that I’ve ever worked with have been highly concentrated on the sales pipeline – how it changes, and whether it’s progressing towards revenue. A big question I’ve received from every sales leader is, “How do I compare the pipeline from the beginning of the quarter to now?”. Insert your own time frame range into that question as needed – that part always varies.
Analyzing pipeline change over time can be an important job. There are certainly paid tools that can do it, and you can also get a variation of it by doing something like Pipeline Snapshots and an even more bare-bones version using the regular Opportunity Field History.
However, those two options aren’t great – Pipeline Snapshots aren’t going to highlight change over time, and Field History is going to do even less than that. In both of these, you’d have to export the data to something like Excel or PowerBI to get some interesting analytics and a nice user experience.
That’s where Opportunity Historical Trending comes in. Once enabled, this feature allows the user to pick and choose dates for comparison, highlights changes in a user-friendly way (red for decreases in amount, green for increases), and allows for all of the normal filtering – not just on the historically captured fields.
Enable Historical Trending on Opportunities
Enabling this feature is easy (much easier than Pipeline Snapshots, if you’ve already done that). Just navigate to Setup, then “Historical Trending”. Click “Opportunity”, check the box to enable, and click “Save”.

Soon after, you should get an email (like the one below). Once you have received this email, you should be ready to build your first report.

Build Your First Report
Navigate to your Reports tab and click “New Report”. Get the report called “Opportunities with Historical Trending” and then start your report.

The first thing you will need to do is set your filters for which opportunities you want to review. In this example, I’m just going to add “Type equals New Customer”, but you will need to use whatever filters apply for your specific org.

Next, in the Outline tab, we’re going to choose the dates we want to compare. You can add up to five separate dates, but you do not need to add “Today” as one of those five.

To keep things more organized for this article, I’m just going to be using one date for comparison. In the lower section of your outline, you will see Historical columns added for Stage, Amount, and Close Date (one for each snapshot date you selected). I recommend reorganizing these columns in a way that makes sense to you and your users.

Run your report, and take a look at the initial results.

Here are the most important things to note:
- After the Opportunity Name column, each column is paired with its matching Historical and Now columns, with the Historical column first.
- Even though I didn’t add “today” or “now”, that still appears.
- Stage changes are highlighted in green.
- Amount changes are highlighted in red when the value drops and green when the value increases.
- Close dates are highlighted in red for an earlier date and green for a later date.
- Opportunities that had not been created on the first date will still appear (see row no. 11 on the screenshot above).
- Currency fields can still be summed up like in a traditional report.
- Total change will be displayed at the top of the report.

Additional Considerations
If you take another look at that email, you’ll notice it mentions a couple of important facts. Mainly, it can only be run for the current month and the prior three months. Make sure you let your leadership know that they will not be able to compare further back than that.
Another thing to note is that you cannot customize how the color palette works on this report. This might seem like a minor thing, but consider that when sales pushes a close date further into the future – that generally is a ‘bad’ thing, and many people expect that to be shown as red. However, by default, it’s shown as green.
Same thing for stage changes – if an opportunity was in “Closed Won”, and it gets backed out or moved into a lower stage, that will show as green, even though the Stage was reverted.
Notice the row displayed in the screenshot below. This opportunity was moved out of “Closed Won” all the way back to “Prospecting”, and the close date was pushed out from 2019 all the way to 2022. These are both traditionally negative actions but appear here as green.

Customize and Add to Dashboards as Needed
Now that you have a base report and know about all the considerations, you can add this to your sales dashboard, set up an email notification, or share it with your sales leadership.
I’m a big fan of using this report to monitor changes in amount over time, and then using something like an Opportunity Field History Report to see stage changes (for example, the number of opportunities that increased or decreased in stage over a given period).
Summary
Overall, this is one of my favorite features of Salesforce for capturing and displaying pipeline trending, particularly for amounts. While it’s not perfect – red and green confusion, I’m looking at you – it has a lot of benefits. From an admin perspective, it is one of the absolute easiest things you can set up in Salesforce, and gives you almost immediate actionable results in a very user-friendly view – something that a lot of features for historical data are lacking in Salesforce.
Hopefully, you’re able to implement this feature for your org and have found this guide helpful. If your business is considering a paid solution, this is a good option to try out first before investing and committing to a third-party tool.
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