Ever been asked to rename Opportunity stage names by your sales business stakeholders? This seemingly simple request can be a headache inducing nightmare for Salesforce teams because stage names can often be some of the most interdependent values in your org. It can be awkward to have to explain that changing some names can take weeks.
I’ve been asked several times to do this exercise in orgs of varying size and complexity. We use a pretty amazing tool Sonar pretty often to determine dependencies on a day to day basis for requests like this. Nearly every time the layers of complexity Sonar digs ups begets this exercise taking an inordinate amount of time and effort. When originally researching this topic, I came across this crafty post by Sander de Jong on the IdeaExchange which blew me away.
Turns out, using the Translation Workbench, you can set English translations for English language users to make labels appear as something else. It’s a brilliant trick. My experience has predominantly been in orgs where English is the primary language of its end users, so this feature really flew under the radar for me personally.
Is this how you should rename your stages? Absolutely not! However, this “MacGyver” style idea can immediately address the needs of the business while you can do the proper backend work. However it’s worth noting this only works inside of Salesforce, so if there’s external systems looking at Opportunity data, the original stage names are going to show up in something like Tableau. Nothing like giving the team some buffer time though to do the correct end to end adjustments!