What are  stage components?

1. Conversions to next stage
   
2. Conversions to win stage
   
3. Stagnation
   
4. Spillage or drop-outs
   
5. Delays in convergence
   

Availability

Stage component is available for organizations in Enterprise and Ultimate editions.

Business scenarios

1. Understanding pipeline patterns 
   Sales pipelines are sets of stages found universally in all kinds of successful businesses. Their specifics may vary widely, but most pipelines have the same general shape: They start from the qualification stage and proceed to analysis, proposal, negotiation, decision-making, and finally closure. All these stages require full attention to produce successful transactions. But often, in business, not all prospects convert, and there are multiple possible reasons for their decisions. Using Zoho CRM's stage component tool, you can develop a comprehensive understanding of your process by identifying how conversions move from one stage to another, how many records are waiting in their threshold, and how many have stalled and dropped out.
   
   
2. Mitigating spillage and delays in a real estate scenario
   Generating and converting leads is one of the most challenging tasks in the real estate industry, either because prospects have an abundance of options, or simply because real estate is a costly business. In processes like these with long timelines, response delays and drop-outs are quite common.
   However, that's all the more reason to have a tightly-knit monitoring process and to create a highly customized and efficient process. You can build the stages involved in lead conversion into a picklist so that upon creating a record, you can define target stages and determine the average wait time for each stage.
   The stage component will generate a visual report of your records' conversion patterns, with details such as the duration of each stage, the number of direct conversions to the won stage, and the number of direct drop-outs to the lost stage.

Types of stage components

1. Basic staircase
   
2. Advanced staircase
   
3. Tabular view
   
4. Stacked bars 

Basic staircase 

1. Number of records entering each stage
   
2. Number of conversions to the next stage
   
3. Conversion rate
   
4. Number of direct wins from each stage 
   
5. Number of direct drop-outs from each stage
   
6. Overall win rate
   

Advanced staircase 

1. Number of records moved
   
2. Number of records moved with delay
   
3. Number of records waiting
   
4. Number of records stalled
   

1. The moved stage indicates records that progressed to another stage within the three-day timeframe.
   
2. The moved with delay stage indicates records that were moved after the three-day cutoff.
   
3. Records in the waiting stage are within their threshold but there are no movements.
   
4. Records that are stalled have exceeded the timeframe and have never moved.

Tabular view 

Stacked bars 

In the stacked bar representation, the stage component is categorized according to similar metrics.

Notes:

1. The chart will also show records that enter directly into the process at any stage.
   
2. The chart will not visually represent any records that are marked as closed won while being created. However, the count will be included in the overall win rate.

Configuring the stage component 

The stage component tracks records from one stage to another throughout the business process. To capture this transition, the component relies on a picklist field in a module.

Prerequisites 

1. Ensure you have a picklist with values that represent the different stages of your sales process.
   
2. Enable history tracking for that picklist field in the layout editor.
   

1. Go to the Analytics module in Zoho CRM.
   If it isn't listed among the module tabs, it will be available under the dropdown.
2. Click the Add component button.
   
   
3. In the Add Component pop-up, select Stage from the list.
   
   You will see the available style options.
   
   
4. Choose Basic staircase from the Choose stage style page.
   
   
5. In the Configure component page, do the following:
   
1. Provide a component name.
   
   
2. Select the module and picklist field.
   
   If you've chosen the Deals module and have created multiple pipelines, then pipeline will be displayed. You can select the pipeline if it has already been created.
3. Select the duration for which you'd like to monitor the pipeline's conversions.
   
   
4. Select the target stages you want to monitor. You can choose one or more target stages in the win/loss category.
   
   When no pipeline is configured for the Deals module, the values for target stages will be fetched automatically from the stage-probability mapping.
6. Click Save.

Notes:

1. To configure advanced staircase, tabular, or stacked component types, repeat the above steps and represent the stalled stage. You can either define a common duration for all stages or set a custom duration for each stage separately.
   
   
2. You must set a minimum of one day as average time for a stage.
   
3. You can create a stage component for picklist fields that have a minimum of two and maximum of 50 picklist values.
   
4. A module can have only one picklist field with history tracking enabled. Thus, for any module, you can create a stage component for only one picklist field.
   
5. User needs to select a picklist value for at least one target stage.
   

Special Cases  

Unaccounted case 

For deals module without pipeline and other general modules: When a stage (picklist value) is deleted from the picklist field, the records that were in that deleted stage will fall under a category called Unaccounted. Only the records which are waiting or stalled in that deleted stage, will be shown in the Unaccounted bar.

For deals module with pipeline: When a stage is deleted from a particular pipeline, the records that were in that deleted stage will fall under the Unaccounted category. Only the records that are waiting or stalled in that deleted stage, will be shown in the Unaccounted bar.

 

In addition to records associated with deleted picklist values, records created with an empty value ("None") for its picklist field will also fall under the Unaccounted category.

Please note that if there are records only in Unaccounted bar, then the stage component will display "No data available" message. This is because no valid analysis can be made if there is only unaccounted data. Showing unaccounted data alone will therefore doesn't make sense in a stage component. 

Replaced picklist values

Since Stage component work completely based on the history tracked, when a stage (picklist value) is replaced by another stage, say if a record deal has passed through qualification to reach negotiation, and then negotiation is replaced with qualification for certain change in the business process, the deal will be counted twice in qualification (First count happened when it passed through qualification, and the second count was due to stage replacement).

When a record is reverted to a previous stage 

Since the record flow is tracked, if a record is reverted to a stage in which it has previously been, the record will be counted twice in the reverted stage.
For example, let's say a lead is moved from lead status contact in future, to contacted, to not qualified, and then reverted back to contacted. For this lead, the stage contacted will be counted twice. This is because stage component tracks not the count of the records but actually the number of times a record hits each stage.