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Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Pipeline Inspection

By Christine Marshall

Salesforce Pipeline Inspection is revolutionizing the way sales managers and their teams manage their sales pipeline within Salesforce. With a modern and intuitive interface, plus a plethora of AI-generated insights, you can gain next-level visibility and control over your pipeline.

In this article, we’ll cover exactly what Salesforce Pipeline Inspection is, who it’s for, key features, and how to get started.

What Is Salesforce Pipeline Inspection?

Salesforce Pipeline Inspection provides a new way for sales managers and their teams to visualize and manage their sales pipeline within Salesforce.

A consolidated view of pipeline metrics, opportunities, week-to-week changes, AI-driven insights, close date predictions, and activity information. Salesforce

There are three features that come together to make up Pipeline Inspection:

  • Einstein Deal Insights: Provides predictions around deal health, such as likelihood to close, deal progression, conversations, and service cases.
  • Activity and Contact Intelligence: Track activity metrics and see the details of recent engagements, including insights from emails and calls. Learn whether the right contacts are engaged in the deal, and discover and add new contacts found in activities.
  • Tiered Einstein Opportunity Scores: While Einstein Opportunity Scoring is a feature in its own right, when put into the context of Pipeline Inspection there is a big switch. Instead of scores as numbers, opportunity scores are shown in tiers, acting like categories of “High”, “Medium”, and “Low”. This means green arrows appear when the score goes up, and red arrows appear should the score go down a tier.

Available with Performance, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions. Pipeline Inspection is also available with Revenue Intelligence, which is available at an additional cost for Enterprise and Unlimited editions. Revenue Intelligence adds capabilities to Pipeline Inspection like the deal flow chart to help sales managers understand deal movement.

READ MORE: Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring: Overview & Deep Dive Tutorial

Who Is Salesforce Pipeline Inspection For?

Pipeline Inspection can become a sales manager’s best friend, providing key information about an individual rep’s (or team’s) forecast for a given period.

Benefits include:

  • Surface pipeline trends and track key metrics in one consolidated view.
  • The ability to prioritize important deals or identify those at risk with AI-driven signals to drive focus.
  • Visibility of individual and team performance.
  • Coach reps on the next best step with real-time insights and visibility into deal and customer activity.

It’s not just for managers though! Salesforce Pipeline Inspection provides an interactive and intuitive interface that will increase user adoption for all sales users.

Salesforce Pipeline Inspection Key Features

Say goodbye to building numerous reports, switching tools, or analyzing deals with one unified Salesforce view. This view allows granular filtering, provides insights, and highlights critical changes.

Once set up, users will access this feature via the Opportunities tab, by clicking “Pipeline Inspection”.

Preset Quick Filters

Preset filters make using Pipeline Inspection a breeze. Simply select your period, team, or user, plus any other filters you wish to apply.

You can then click on any of the pipeline metrics to hone in on Opportunities that match that metric, for example, to show Opportunities that have increased in value.

Pipeline Inspection Metrics

Pipeline Inspection comes with two pre-configured metrics groups:

  • Forecast Categories: See your pipeline categorized by the sales rep’s confidence in winning the deal in a given period. Categories include Commit, Best Case, and Open Pipeline.
  • Pipeline Changes: See how the pipeline has changed over time. Categories include New, Increased, Decreased, Moved In, and Moved Out.

Important Opportunities

To track your key deals, you can manually mark up to 200 Opportunities as important. Then filter the list to see just your important opportunities for the selected period. You can also manage your list of important opportunities in the “My Important Opportunities” view via the pipeline views dropdown.

Opportunity Changes

To quickly identify Opportunities that have changed, the most recent changes that occurred in the past seven days are highlighted. Changes to amounts, close dates, forecast categories, and stages are highlighted with red and green text and arrows.

For example, when the Opportunity Amount has increased the Amount will be highlighted in green with an upward arrow.

Similarly, if the Opportunity Amount decreases, the Amount will be highlighted in red with a downward arrow.

If the “Next Step” field has not been updated in seven days or more, a red clock will appear.

Staying in touch and updating the Opportunity is often key to a successful deal, that’s why Pipeline Inspection will show useful statistics including:

  • When the last activity was or how many days remain until an upcoming activity is planned.
  • How many days the Opportunity has been in the current stage.
  • The overall age of the Opportunity.
  • A push count which indicates how many times the Opportunity Close Date has been pushed from one calendar month to the next.

Inline Edit

You can quickly and easily update the Opportunity using the inline edit functionality, which means you can change the Opportunity Amount or Close Date. Unlike list views, you can even inline edit without first needing to filter the list to a single record type.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Einstein Opportunity Scoring for Pipeline Inspection will categorize an Opportunity as “High”, “Medium”, or “Low” instead of displaying the individual score.

The categories are handily color-coded, making it easy to see at a glance the likelihood of winning.

Green arrows appear when the score goes up a tier, and red arrows appear if the score goes down a tier. Hover over the Opportunity Score to see details.

Deal Insights

Users can click on the Einstein icon to open the panel containing extra information to help sales reps. The “Overview” tab provides deeper insights into a specific deal, for example, where more engagement or more meetings are needed. For instance, opportunities are flagged as needing more attention if they are stuck in the current Opportunity Stage, if there are not enough activities, or if there are open Cases.

Activities

The Activity tab of the insights panel reveals a mini activity timeline, plus counts of types of activities. Users can also take action from the Activity tab by logging activities or sending an email. If you have Einstein Conversation Insights, you can also view relevant transcript snippets from previous video and audio calls.

“Who’s Involved” shows you which external contacts and internal team members have been active on this deal. You can review their role/title and how many activities they’ve been involved in, and add contacts to the opportunity if they don’t yet have roles. To use this feature, turn on Activity 360 Reporting from Einstein Activity Capture.

Pipeline Inspection Charts

  • Waterfall Chart: The waterfall chart will show changes such as Opportunities created, increased and decreased values in the pipeline, plus won and lost amounts according to the filters and period you set.

If you have Revenue Intelligence, you will also have access to the Flow Chart.

  • Flow Chart: The flow chart will show the changes in Opportunity forecast categories according to the filters and period you set.

How Do I Get Salesforce Pipeline Inspection?

Salesforce Pipeline Inspection is available with Performance, Enterprise, and Unlimited editions. It’s also available with Revenue Intelligence, which is available at an additional cost for Enterprise and Unlimited editions.

How Do I Set Up Salesforce Pipeline Inspection?

From a setup perspective, it doesn’t get more intuitive than this – Pipeline Inspection can be enabled by admins with the click of a button, and all necessary steps are highlighted, so you can be certain this will be a success. There’s even a short three-minute video embedded at the top.

  1. Go to Setup > Feature Settings > Sales > Opportunities > Pipeline Inspection Setup (or search “Pipeline Inspection” in the quick find box!).
  2. Turn on Pipeline Inspection.
  3. Verify that historical trending is enabled and configured for Opportunities.
  4. Add the Pipeline Inspection button to the Opportunity tab.
  5. To show Opportunity scores, set up Einstein Opportunity Scoring.
  6. Assign the Pipeline Inspection or Pipeline Inspection Included permission set to the relevant users. If you have Revenue Intelligence, you can assign the Revenue Intelligence User permission set.

Don’t forget to review the setup steps required for additional optional features that can provide even greater insights here!

READ MORE: Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring: Overview & Deep Dive Tutorial

Summary

Pipeline Inspection is an exciting new feature for sales users, increasing user adoption while making sales pipeline forecasting increasingly efficient and accurate. This feature is sure to be a firm favorite with sales managers and their teams.

Resources

The Author

Christine Marshall

Christine is the Courses Director at Salesforce Ben. She is an 11x certified Salesforce MVP and leads the Bristol Admin User Group.

Comments:

    Bryn Leahy
    May 20, 2024 8:39 pm
    I see that Pipeline Inspection will also now provide how to Identify Potentially Risky Contacts on Deals as of Summer '24, with a contact detractor insight. It would be great to get glimpse of this functionality.

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