Dashboards and Reporting: Making the Most of Your Data in Salesforce

#FocusOnTechnology

Dashboards and Reporting: Making the Most of Your Data in Salesforce

#FocusOnTechnology

Salesforce – Tips for Dashboards and Reporting

As the world’s premier CRM, Salesforce offers a a number of built in tools that can be used to visualize your sales, service, and marketing data. The goal is to help you forecast results, monitor your current metrics, and generate actionable business insights. Most of these visualization tools are designed to be used by non-technical team members, making it simple for even novice users to generate important data. This blog will help make the most of your data in Salesforce by providing a few valuable tips for dashboards and reporting.

Creating Salesforce Dashboards

The first and most important step is to understand the key components of Salesforce dashboards. Salesforce offers both reports and dashboards. The reports are a great way to do a deep dive into your your sales, service, and marketing data sets while the dashboards allow you to view quick visualizes of up to 20 key items at once. The goal is to get a snapshot of your performance, identify positive trends, or areas for improvement at a single glance.

Most companies use these dashboards to report on some combination of financial and productivity data:

  • Financial data usually includes the value of your sales pipeline by stage and sales rep, the total value of your won and lost deals, usually with snapshots of weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual trends.
  • The productivity data normally includes the number of booked calls and meetings by sales rep, the number of current leads, and similar data to keep track of all of your sales activities; for Service Cloud users, productivity data focuses on the cases being handled by your CSRs, average time to close, SLA compliance, etc.
  • Marketing Cloud users should expect to see information related to their campaign performance, engagement with emails, etc.
The first step to creating your custom reports is to create a new dashboard or choose an existing one to edit. From there, you have the ability to choose from charts, tables, and metrics. The charts feature a wide variety of visualization including funnels, donuts, bar graphs, and more to make the most of your data. The metrics let you choose from sales and opportunity data, financial data in Salesforce, activity data, or for Service Cloud user case and other data.

The creation and management of these dashboards is another feature that has been greatly improved in Salesforce’s new Lightning Experience interface. It features drag and drop capabilities and other tools to make it much easier to identify the metric and choose the visualization. Lightning also supports interactive dashboards, allowing you to filter and segment data in real time.

Customize Your Experience

Creating and viewing a dashboard is only one part of the process. You also have the option to customize your dashboards and make them dynamic in nature. This can be achieved by identifying your organizational specific KPIs—for example, reporting only on custom activities that are important to your business—that you want your team members to view.

You can also create filters will allow your team members to view their personal sales performance, along with the performance of the overall company. You have the ability to choose who can see which metrics, supporting a consolidated view for management and individual view for your sales reps or CSR’s.

You can even schedule dashboards and reports to be sent out on a regular basis, allowing your team members to view them right before your Monday morning meeting!

Share Your Dashboards

Salesforce also allows you to share your dashboards using different channels. This can be an extremely useful feature in case you are working with a global team or other remote resources. You have the choice of sharing dashboards via emails, web links, presentations, and PDFs. Therefore, the dashboards can be accessed from anywhere, helping your team keep track of their performance on the go. Another important feature is that these dashboards update automatically, thereby ensuring that you do not miss out on important sales updates.

Please contact us to learn more. We specialize in helping customers visualize their data on Salesforce, providing turnkey consulting, implementation, and support services.

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