How to Measure Contact Stage Conversion Percentages in Salesforce

Salesforce doesn’t have an easy, out-of-the-box way to measure contact stage conversion percentages, even though it’s an extremely important metric for marketing teams. I’ll explain why this metric is so critical, and how to create a report inside Salesforce that shows contact stage conversion percentages.

A caveat:

1. This is assuming that you’re exclusively working with the Contact object.

   • The same steps would work with Lead records, but if your workflow involves both Contacts and Leads, the steps in this article won’t give you a complete solution.

2. You’ll need History Tracking enabled for your Contact Stage field.

   • Hit “Set History Tracking” from the “Fields & Relationships” section of the Contact object in the Object Manager.

Contact Stages

As a marketer, one of the primary goals is to generate revenue for your organization. To do this, you need to ensure that the leads you generate are nurtured properly and moved down the sales funnel towards conversion. This is where tracking contact stage conversion percentages comes in handy.

By measuring the conversion rates of each stage in your contact conversion funnel, you can identify bottlenecks and optimize your marketing campaigns to improve conversion rates, ultimately leading to more revenue for the org. However, to measure conversion rates effectively, you need to have a clear understanding of the contact stages in your sales funnel and track the movement of contacts between them.

Step 1: Define your sales funnel stages

Before creating the report, you need to define the various stages in your sales funnel. For example, if you're selling software, your contact stages might include “New”, "Awareness," "Interest," "Contacted," and "Opportunity Created."

Step 2: Create a Contact History report

Once you've defined your sales funnel stages, you can create a Contact History report in Salesforce. This report will show you the movement of your leads through each stage in your sales funnel.

To create a Contact History report, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Reports tab in Salesforce

2. Click on the New Report button

3. Select the Contact History report type

4. Include a filter for “Field/Event = Your Stage Field"

   • This means we’ll only see rows when a contact changes stages

5. Add whatever other filters you’d like

6. Choose the fields you want to include in your report, such as the contact's name, email, phone number, and stage

7. Group rows by “Old Value” and Columns by “New Value

Step 3: Add summary level formulas to your report

Now that you have a Contact History report showing the movement of your leads through your sales funnel, you can add summary level formulas to calculate the conversion rates of each stage.

To add a summary level formula to your report, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Add Formula button in your report

2. Choose “Percent” for Formula Output Type

3. Use RowCount / PREVGROUPVAL(RowCount, NEWVAL,1) in for your formula

4. Save

Step 4: Add a Chart

You can just look at the conversion percentages at the bottom of the report, but if you want to add this to a dashboard, you’ll want a chart. You can create a combo chart in Salesforce that shows both 1) the number of records that moved into each stage, and 2) the conversion from the previous stage. Here’s how:

1. Click the “Toggle Chart” button on the top row, to the left of “Save & Run”

2. Select “Column Chart” for “Display As”

3. Set x-axis to “New Value”

4. Set y-axis to “Record Count”

5. Click “+ Measure” and select your summary formula

6. Check the “Plot as Line Chart” and “Plot on Second Axis” checkboxes

7. Check “Show Values” if you like

Step 5: Analyze your report

With your report and summary level formulas in place, you can now analyze the data and identify areas for optimization. For example, if you notice that many leads are dropping off in the "Awareness" stage, you might want to optimize your marketing campaigns to better target and nurture leads at that stage.

Measuring contact stage conversion percentages is an essential task for marketers looking to drive revenue for their organization. By creating a Salesforce report using summary level formulas, you can easily track your leads' movement through your sales funnel and identify areas for optimization.

Hopefully, this was an easy guide to reporting on a critical but usually not so easy metric to report on!