Business Process Flow: Opportunity Sales Process Flow Explained

There have been questions in the Dynamics CRM Community Forum around the opportunity sales process flow. I thought I would put together a one-pager to explain the relationship between various components of the opportunity sales process and the configuration options

The data model for the Sales process flow in CRM 2013 is depicted below:

One sales process can have multiple sales stages. These sales stages have a one-to-one mapping with ‘Stage Category’. The ‘Stage Category’ is a Global OptionSet with values such as Qualify, Develop, Propose, Close etc. You can configure additional values to this Global OptionSet.

Each sales stage, together with ‘Stage Category’ can have multiple steps. Each step will then have to be mapped to a field on the entity. In the Opportunity entity, you will find a text field called ‘Pipeline Phase’. The ‘Pipeline Phase’ is a text field and the value on this field is automatically populated by the CRM platform. The value held by this field is actually the Stage Category prefixed by the Stage Category OptionSet index.

Now, the question is where does the OptionSet ‘Opportunity Stage’ come into the picture?

The ‘Opportunity Stage’ field is not linked to any of the Sales Process flow fields in CRM 2013. With the help of workflows or business rules, you can assign a value to the ‘Opportunity Stage’ field.