CRM On Demand Learning Blog

People in our sales groups hear a lot of good questions from potential customers who are evaluating CRM On Demand. So, it’s not surprising that some of the best solutions to real use requirements come from the people in those sales groups. I saw one such solution this week that I thought might be useful to many – a very straight-forward way to make sure that sales people don’t re-open an Opportunity record once it has been closed, using field validation. Of course, not every company has this requirement, but you could also use it in other contexts, so keep it in mind for your “how can we…” –type discussions.

Here's how it works:
(Many thanks to Karthik Jayagovind for providing this content.)

You might want to prevent users from changing the Opportunity Sales Stage picklist value from ‘Closed/Lost’ or ‘Closed/Won’ back to any of the earlier stages (say, ‘Short List’, ‘Negotiation’, etc.). This can be achieved by writing a field validation rule for the ‘Sales Stage Id’ field in the Opportunity record-type. Usually field validation rules are written directly for the field that one wants to control, but in this case, you cannot write these rules for the Sales Stage field, because the field validation option is disabled. Instead you can use the Sales Stage Id field to achieve the same result.

To do this:

1. Locate Sales Stage Id on the Opportunity Field Setup page and click the Edit link.
   
2. Enter the following rule in the Field Validation field:
   PRE('')<>'Closed/Won' AND PRE('')<>'Closed/Lost'
   If you want only users with a certain role, such as the Administrator, to have the ability to change a closed opportunity to one of the earlier stages, then you can exclude that user role in the field validation rule:
   (PRE('')<>'Closed/Won' AND PRE('')<>'Closed/Lost') OR (UserValue('')='Administrator')
   
3. Enter the error message that should display when a user tries to change the sales stage value on a closed Opportunity record.
   
4. Click Save.
   
5. Test the field validation rule to make sure it works as you expect.
   

If you want to see more detail, including more pictures, check out this document on My Oracle Support: Restricting Opportunity Sales Stage Value Using Field Validation (Doc ID 841398.1). (You'll need to sign in with your My Oracle Support account to access the document.)

We’re always interested in finding better ways to share our favorite CRM On Demand resources with you. However, depending on where you are in your CRM On Demand experience, your needs for information will most likely vary. So, we started to think that maybe this is where social applications and sites can play a role in training.

Instead of our “pushing” out information to you, perhaps everyone visiting our site could “pull” content from one another as well. We could add an interactive or social element to our training resources, so customers or partners could add content and share “tribal knowledge” from their experiences with CRM On Demand.

Give us your opinion on this idea! Would a social element to a training site be something you would find useful? Is this something you would contribute to? Do you have something better in mind? Post a comment on this article and let us know what you think!