It’s Wednesday morning and the weekly pipeline report is due. You have two options: a) cower in the corner b) step up with the big players by understanding and owning salesforce.com reports. Every great sales organization has a sound system in place to record and measure sales efforts. Salesforce.com reports and dashboards are the best way to do this.
Step 1: Find the most important information to your business. If you walked into your CEO’s office right now and asked him/her three questions:
- “what keeps you up at night?” (example: revenue, productivity, sales efficiency)
- “what metrics are most important to you?” (example: deals closed, demos initiated, emails sent)
- “what behavior would you like to see us encourage” (number of calls made, demos scheduled etc.)
Step 2: Record the correct data. Assuming you know the most important metrics to your organization, now is the important decision to track the right data. Here’s how to do it:
- Pick a limited number of Key Performance Indicators. The industry average of of KPI’s is 5-10 for the entire business.
- Keep it simple. Focus only on dashboards/reports that tie directly to key business initiatives.
- Name the reports clearly and concisely. (example: Salesloft Sales Team Calls, Converted Leads from Inbound Leads)
- Determine who has access to the reports.
Step 3: Build the reports. Save yourself tons of headaches by understanding the reports.
- Start with out-of-the-box reports. salesforce.com offers standard across all standard objects.
Know the three different types of reports and how they’re used.
- Tabular reports are easiest and quickest way to return your data in a simple list view format. It’s important to know, Tabular reports can’t be used to create dashboard components.
- Summary reports return your data with subtotals and other summary-level information. Summary reports are great for showing average dollar values for closed won opportunities by salesperson or number of cases by status by a support representative.
- Matrix reports show data summaries against both horizontal and vertical criteria; for example, total sales per sales rep per year by quarter.
3 different types of dashboards you should know:
- Pie and donut charts are useful for displaying data that shows proportions of a total, such as the number of leads by lead source.
- Horizontal bar/vertical column charts are great for showing geographical data, stage or status information, or any data that’s part of a single grouping.
- The funnel chart is best used for showing ordered picklists such as opportunity stage, case status, or lead stage.