Posted on March 23, 2020 in Guides, Admins  

Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring: Overview & Deep Dive Tutorial

Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring gives each opportunity a score between 1-99 that indicates the likelihood of winning. Einstein scoring can guide your sales teams, enabling them to prioritize a sure win or escalate at-risk pipeline. In addition, Einstein provides handy information on the factors that contributed to the score.

Einstein Opportunity Scores are available as a field on the opportunity record, in list views, reports and on the forecast page*. What’s more, it’s free for Performance or Unlimited edition customers, and available to Enterprise customers at an extra cost. In this article we’ll cover how it works, how to set it up, and some handy hints.

*as long as you are using Collaborative Forecasts.

How Does Einstein Opportunity Scoring Work?

Einstein uses artificial intelligence to analyse your past opportunities to calculate each score.

Einstein will re-analyse your data and adjust the data model accordingly once a month so you can be sure your score is always accurate!

Source: Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring

In Classic, the score will be displayed as a field in the record detail of an opportunity:

Source: Salesforce Einstein Opportunity Scoring

As well as providing a score, Einstein will indicate both positive and negative factors that contributed to the score. To view these factors in Lightning, simply hover over the score.

Positive examples:

• Previous won opportunities with the related account
• Opportunity moving quickly through the stages
• High numbers of activities on the related account
• Opportunity has an open quote

Negative examples:

• Previous lost opportunities with the related account
• Close date overdue or being pushed out
• Low numbers of activities on the related account
• Low success rate in the industry assigned to the related account

Einstein Opportunity Scoring in list views. Source: Salesforce Help Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Einstein Opportunity Scoring on the Forecasts page – available if you are using Collaborative Forecasts. Source: Salesforce Help Einstein Opportunity Scoring

Customizing The Einstein Opportunity Scoring Model

As of the Winter ’21 release, Einstein Opportunity Scoring is even more powerful and supports the ability to customize and personalize your scoring model to suit your business needs. You can do this by excluding certain records or particular custom fields from the scoring model.

Do this during the initial setup or, at any point in the future, by reviewing the settings and fine tuning your scoring model.

• Edit Settings:

• Choose to consider all Opportunities or only Opportunities that meet the conditions you set:

• Choose to consider all custom fields or exclude custom fields that are irrelevant to the score:

These additional features take Einstein Opportunity Scoring to the next level and remove several of the niggles from when it was first released.

Sounds Great, Can I Have Einstein Opportunity Scoring?

This great feature will be available for free, as long as your organisation meets the following requirements:

• Salesforce in Classic or Lightning (you need to switch Einstein on in Lightning)
• Performance, or Unlimited edition

Enterprise edition customers can purchase Einstein Opportunity Scoring at an additional cost.

There are also a few other caveats to consider; whilst you may be able to get Einstein Opportunity Scoring because you meet the criteria above, you may not be able to use it unless you:

• Use the standard Stage field
• Have 200 closed won opportunities in the past two years, each with a minimum lifespan of 2 days
• Have 200 closed lost opportunities in the past two years, each with a minimum lifespan of 2 days
• Have an average of one update to each closed opportunity

Set Up Einstein Opportunity Scoring

System Administrators for eligible customers will get a prompt to let them know the feature is ready to be turned on (To set up this feature and enable it for all users, you will need the Customize Application, View All Data and Modify All Data permissions, and these are included in the System Administrator profile). There’s even a little video you can watch:

1. Head over to Setup. Note: You must do this from Lightning Experience, not Classic!

2. From within Setup, type “Assisted Setup” in the Quick Find bar, then choose Einstein Sales → Assisted Setup.

3. Select that you confirm you understand what will happen when you turn on Einstein (unsure what happens? Click here). 

4. This next bit is important! Before proceeding, you’ll want to review the terms of using Einstein Opportunity Scoring with your company and get authorisation to continue. Once you and your company are happy, tick “I’m authorised by my company to accept these terms” and click “Confirm”.

5. Choose to have Einstein consider all opportunity records or only a subset when creating the scoring model.

6. to have Einstein consider all opportunity custom fields or deselect any fields that should be excluded when creating the scoring model.

Then sit back while Salesforce does the hard work for you! Once you turn on Einstein Opportunity Scoring, Salesforce will begin to analyze your past opportunities and create a scoring model (this may take a few hours to a few days depending on the volume of data).

When I set it up, it only took a matter of minutes for Salesforce to complete my setup. When I checked back I had a green message to let me know the feature was turned on for all users but that some scores may not show up right away.

Now, when I look at Einstein Opportunity Scoring in Setup, I see it’s “On”.

Feeling very impressed at how quick and easy the setup was, I eagerly went to check out some scores.

Adding The Score Field

Once the scoring model is generated, Salesforce will automatically add the Score field to standard and custom opportunity page layouts, as well as the ‘Recently Viewed’ list view.

Opportunity Compact Layout

The score appeared on the opportunity compact layout by default and was called “Opportunity Score” (the field name was updated in the Winter ’21 release from “Score” to “Opportunity Score”).

Opportunity Standard List Views

The hard bit was trying to remember which of my list views were standard. I checked several list views I thought were standard but they didn’t display the score and I began to worry it hadn’t worked properly. Turns out, it was absolutely user error, and once I finally found a standard list view the score had been added by default and was called “Opportunity Score”.

Opportunity Custom List Views

The score isn’t automatically added to custom list views but you can easily add it by choosing the fields you wish to display.

The Scores

I was really pleased to discover that Einstein Opportunity Scoring bases it’s predictions on custom fields, as well as standard fields, making the score really useful and personalised.

The scoring factors were clear and to the point, for example:

• High success rate for opportunities at this stage
• Past wins with this account
• Opportunity stuck in current stage
• Close date keeps being delayed

Renamed Fields

From the Winter ’21 release, Einstein Opportunity Scoring reflects any opportunity fields that have been renamed, making it easier than ever for your users to understand the factors contributing to their scores. For example, if you’ve renamed “Amount” to “Revenue”, the guidance will refer to the “Revenue” field e.g. “Opportunity Revenue Went Up” as a positive factor.

Einstein Opportunity Scoring: Handy Hints

Check out these handy hints to ensure your setup goes as smoothly as possible:

• Have an opportunity with a score but no guidance? It may be that there were too many minor factors that contributed to the score or because the calculation was too complex; in both instances, it is too difficult to summarise the reasons behind the score.
• Got a closed opportunity with no score? That’s correct! The opportunity score is removed from all closed opportunities.
• Got an open opportunity with no score? There are a number of reasons an open opportunity may not display a score ranging from how recently Einstein Opportunity Scoring was enabled to when the opportunity was created. For full details of when a score may not be visible please check out the “When Scores Don’t Appear” section in this article.
• User Permissions – Salesforce will assign the “Sales Cloud Einstein For Everyone” to all users with a Salesforce license as part of the setup process. However, you can remove this permission for users that shouldn’t have access.
• You can optimize the scoring model by choosing which opportunities and opportunity fields Einstein should evaluate.
• Contributing positive and negative factors are dependent on a user’s field access, meaning that they will not see fields or information they should not have access to.

Summary

Overall, Einstein Opportunity Scoring has been a great success, with users really engaging with this new feature! 
Here are some more useful resources:

• Understand How Einstein Scores Your Opportunities
• Einstein Opportunity Scoring Video
• AI for Admins: What You Can Do with Einstein Opportunity Scoring