Welkin's Customizable Path Brings your Salesforce Sales Path to a Completely New Level

We're extremely glad to introduce to you our new AppExchange product - Welkin's Customizable Path. Would you like to give your users better visibility of allowed status transitions? Or forbid certain transitions based on profiles? Or would you like to show them more than 5 key fields? Or, maybe, you'd like to show key fields based on both source and target statuses?

These and many more awesome features are available in Welkin's Customizable Path. Let's see how you can use them to save your time and build a better experience for your Salesforce users!

What is Welkin's Customizable Path?

We're sure that you've used Salesforce's Path component on various record pages, starting from Leads and Opportunities and up to your custom objects with certain flows that users should follow. And the more you use it the more you want from it - there are so many improvements for it that all of us keep in mind that we've decided to get all of them done 🙂

So, in short, Welkin's Customizable Path is a significantly more powerful replacement for a standard Salesforce Path while remaining simple to configure and manage without any code!

If you're the one who prefers to try yourself instead of reading - just check out the demo on AppExchange, but we will anyway describe all the cool perks in this article.

Key Features

If you're wondering why there's so much attention to the “Customizable” word in the title - here's the list of all customizations that you can apply to Welkin's Path:

• Available for all standard & custom objects and for any picklist fields in that objects
• Rename statuses in the Path without changing your picklist labels
• Define statuses as “Happy Path” elements and not" Happy Path" ones
• Restrict or allow certain status changes for certain profiles and/or roles
• Visualize allowed transitions from the current status
• Define sets of fields to be shown to users - screens, and reuse them instead of manually configuring them
• Configure the "Key fields" screen for each status
• Configure the "Transition Prerequisites" screen for any status change depending on the source & target statuses
• Configure the "Post-Transition Screen" screen for any status change depending on the source & target statuses
• Add "Guidance" to any screen - exactly like in the standard Path
• Add a bit of dynamic to the UI with conditions if a field should appear on a screen

Let's go through the most interesting ones in more detail.

Don't forget to check out: SALES PATH: Your Company’s Sales Processes in Lightning Experience

"Happy Path" statuses

Have you ever wondered why the “Closed - Lost” status is visually in the same flow as the “Closed - Won” in Salesforce's Path? It's even worse - it's shown before the “Closed - Won” like it's a step before winning an opportunity 🙂

While everyone got used to this particular case - it's still not very user-friendly and your users will be confused in the case if you have more complicated processes. In Welkin's Customizable Path, you can distinguish between statuses that are part of the success path and statuses that are somewhere aside, like "Closed - Lost", "Nurturing", "Contact Later".

With such kind of visualization, your users will have better visibility of the record's status.

Profile & Role-based Permissions to Transition a Record Between Statuses

Let's imagine that you have the following stages for your opportunity - "Financial Screening" and "Finance Approved". It seems pretty obvious that only your Financial team should be able to perform such a status change. Usually, we would add a Validation Rule to check the profile, but how many Validation Rules would you need to cover all such scenarios? And how easy would it be to manage all of them? Not to mention that your users will know about the restriction only after trying to perform the status change.

In Welkin's Customizable Path, you can easily specify Profiles and Roles that should be allowed to perform each transition - it's just a couple of clicks to configure and it's extremely easy to review all such restrictions in one place!

A Clear Indication of all Allowed Transitions from the Current Stage

Let's add one more real-life scenario to the previous example. It seems correct to not allow an Opportunity to be transitioned from the "Financial Screening" to any status other than "Finance Approved" and "Finance Rejected" (we believe that you have hundreds of your own examples of such kinds of restrictions).

Again, usually, we would add one more Validation Rule that will make sure that this restriction is applied. And we would add Validation Rules for each such restriction - resulting in tens, if not hundreds, of validations… But the worst issue with this approach is that your users don't know what transitions are allowed from the current status, instead, they will see “an error” after trying to do a forbidden transition - they will waste their time and it's a bit frustrating to get errors 🙁

So why not indicate allowed transitions directly in the Path so users won't guess? Especially if it's done automatically by Welkin's Customizable Path.

Transition Prerequisites Screen Before Changing a Status

In addition to the standard “Key Fields” that are shown for current status, it is very common to require some specific data when changing to certain statuses. For example - if moving an Opportunity to the “Closed - Lost” status we would like to make the “Reason” field required, while it won't be required on any other transition.

With the standard Salesforce Path, we will again end up with a lot of Validation Rules and our users will still need to find all needed fields (with records) on a record page. Such kind of "error-driven" user guidance is not productive and confusing for users.

Instead - let's show all fields that are needed for each transition in the same place where we are showing "Key Fields" and clearly mark required fields as required. And as you might guess - without any validation rules.

Just define a screen with fields to be shown and assign it to one or multiple transitions - that's it 🙂

Check out another amazing blog by The Welkin Suite here: How to Improve your Salesforce Org - Top 5 Problems Welkin’s Customizable Path Can Solve

Condition-based Fields on Your Screens

When configuring Salesforce for complicated processes it might be required to show fields on your Key Fields, Transition Prerequisites, or Transition Details screen based on certain conditions.

For example:

• Why showing empty fields in the "Key Fields" screen? Help your users focus on important data.
• Why showing the “Number of Employees” field for your private-person-lead when it's not worth creating a record type for this case?

In Welkin's Customizable Path, you can easily configure such display conditions when creating or editing screens.

So what to do next?
Try it yourself! It's always much better to do it on your own - check out our AppExchange listing and get to know more about this great solution:

• Take a look at it yourself with a quick Test Drive
• Start a free trial to check all configuration options and see if it fits your needs
• Watch videos of the package in action
• Read the usage guide with detailed configuration instructions

If you have any questions - don't hesitate to let us know in the comments or drop us an email at [email protected]