Get the Most out of Your Probability Field in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales

Posted on: March 3, 2017 | By: Jim Bertler | Microsoft Dynamics CRM

An important component of winning any opportunity or job is knowing the chances your organization has to win. If you know the odds that you’ll be successful in closing a deal you can prioritize resources and go after the opportunities that you are most likely to get. Out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales has a field on the Opportunity entity called Probability. This field comes as a native field to the entity, called close probability, and needs to be added to the form to be seen and used. Using probability can be very beneficial because aside from the obvious indicator of letting the user know what the chances the deal will become ‘Won’ will be, the user can get other data from this field. By using calculated fields, workflows, or other Dynamics 365 functionality you can make estimations on revenue and pipeline growth. If you have a $1,000,000 deal that has a probability at 50%, you may want to have a calculated field that adds $500,000 to your revenue forecast.

The definition of a probability field as Microsoft describes it is ‘Type a Number from 1 to 100 that represents the likelihood of closing the opportunity. This can aid the sales team in their efforts to convert the opportunity in a sale.’ As this description is straightforward, we have found that there is a major flaw in the design of this field by Microsoft. The fact that this is a whole number field from 1 to 100 to represent the percentage is cumbersome and cluttered. A probability is supposed to be an estimate. Probability can be interpreted differently by different users. The fact that there are 100 different options to put in this field, means that answers will vary wildly and often be misleading. By having 100 different options means that sorting by probability, which can be very helpful if probability is accurate, is not very useful because how is a user supposed to determine if a 42% probable chance of winning an opportunity is better than one with a 40% chance when this number is subjective anyways. Some users may list opportunities they own as a few percentage points higher in hopes that more resources are dedicated to winning this deal. When this becomes the case, the field begins to lose its meaning and is often left unused.

The good news is that there is a simple solution to this. Through many client implementations, Logan Consulting has found that replacing the inherent whole number probability field with an option set field is an efficient way of having a clean and straightforward probability field. We have found that using 4 options for probability makes the most sense. Often times organizations have 4 Pipeline Phases as well, in which case you can correlate a probability with a phase. The four probability amounts we have found to be the most effective though are 25%, 50%, 75%, and 90%.

These numbers do not overcomplicate the user’s decision to choose a probability and move on. For the most part an opportunity will have low, medium, or high odds of closing which is where 25, 50, and 75 come in. If an opportunity has 100% odds of closing then there is no need to even show the probability, which is why we use 90% to represent that the odds are very likely. This makes the probability field easily sortable, convenient and does not prioritize and deals over others.

If you think that a CRM system is your next best step for your business, contact Logan Consulting your Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner of Chicago.

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