Question

Tracking proposal sent / month

  • 29 July 2021
  • 6 replies
  • 76 views

Userlevel 1

One of the heart beats of my business is how many proposals sent a month. If we do 4 & 75% conversion, we’re good. I’m trying to find a way to track this metric. 

I’ve tried a few approaches on this and did have a very manual solution but I want to make it easier to manage.

Currently, my best idea was to create a custom field on opportunity (Proposal sent - DATE) that automatically populates when I move it between stages (proposal → follow up) in my opportunity pipeline. 

The idea was to count records with proposal sent in certain dates (this month, this Q, this year) but it looks like DATE fields don’t appear either as attributes or as part of the date filter drop down. 

Has anyone tackled an issue like this?


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6 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +1

@brieando thank you for your question. You will have to use Create Date or Close Date for your date filter, as custom date fields are not supported yet within our in-app reporting suite. 

Userlevel 1

Thanks Kevin. So I understand from this that my current approach won't work. Good to know. Frustrating though. What will and won’t work as customer fields in reporting seems completely arbitrary from a users perspective. 

But your answer doesn’t really help me towards my goal. Do you have any idea what actually might work here? 

I want my opportunity to record the state : proposal sent (which is easy I can do that with a checkbox)

But then I want to be able to count how many proposals were sent in a given M, Q, Y. 

If we take the check box example, I can count how many records have a TRUE checkbox but I can’t tell when I made that check box true.

This seems like it should be simple thing to track. 


bh

@brieando I have a similar issue with wanting to report on how many opps move into ‘contract requested’ each week (and then report over time by week/month to track trends), and it doesn’t seem like that is possible yet. Agree that it would definitely be a great thing to be able to track.

Userlevel 5
Badge +3

We built an integration with PandaDoc that automatically logs an activity for "Document Send", "Document Viewed", "Document Completed", "Document Payment".

And then in the "Activity Feed" you can filter down by how many document activities happened the past week/month/quarter/year.

That gets us a rough idea of where things are at.

Thanks Kevin. So I understand from this that my current approach won't work. Good to know. Frustrating though. What will and won’t work as customer fields in reporting seems completely arbitrary from a users perspective. 

But your answer doesn’t really help me towards my goal. Do you have any idea what actually might work here? 

I want my opportunity to record the state : proposal sent (which is easy I can do that with a checkbox)

But then I want to be able to count how many proposals were sent in a given M, Q, Y. 

If we take the check box example, I can count how many records have a TRUE checkbox but I can’t tell when I made that check box true.

This seems like it should be simple thing to track. 


bh

Our company was experiencing a similar issue and we came up with a bit of a workaround. It’s not all cleanly done within Copper but it’s worked well enough for the time being.

We have a checkbox that only gets clicked once we deem an Opportunity as a SQO (“Sales Qualifed Opportunity”). Only problem was, we weren’t able to track when the checkbox was clicked (just like your situation).

What I set up was a simple spreadsheet with columns divided by 7 days. I started with the amount of existing SQOs we had into a cell. Then, once the next week rolled around, I would do the same filter again inside copper (SQO checkbox selected) and entered it into the next cell for the corresponding week in Google Sheets. Then, I set up a row that would simply subtract the difference between each week and that gave me the amount of checkboxes selected within a week.



For your situation, I imagine you could set up the same thing (only monthly), where each column of the spreadsheet would be a month, and then you’d be able to see how many proposals were sent each month.

As far as the conversion rate goes, that’s where it gets a little harder. If you’re looking just for your average conversion rate throughout all time, it’s easy...You could probably set up something in Reports (if you have access to that feature) where you could do a simple Pie Chart. You’d have the “measure” be the Count of Opp ID with the attribute added that your checkbox is selected. Then you’d have the “View By” set to Opp Status and you should be good to go.



If you don’t have access to reports, you could always just head back to that trusty old spreadsheet and have one row dedicated to your proposal sent and another dedicated to your total Opportunities Won. Then make a third row that divides the two with a formula and set the format for that row to a percentage.

Unfortunately, checking each month’s proposal to conversion percentage (and not the overall average) is not something I know how to do using Copper. If you sent a proposal in August but they convert in September, none of the above methods would help determine that monthly conversion rate.

Userlevel 1

Thanks for the response, Alex. PandaDoc looks interesting as a product, but we don’t require its full features. 
I don’t think that another $49 / user / month, just so that I can track a date when the status of a deal has changed, makes any sense to me.