Salesforce.com reporting is arguably the most powerful aspect of the CRM system. Data which is driven by your users and third-party systems percolate up to management metrics that can be used for driving decisions and actions in real-time. As you are building your processes within Salesforce.com, relying on reports to drive user behavior helps to drive accountability and adoption. As your processes mature, your culture will create the inertia for ongoing execution and your key reports will shift to management metrics that reflect the level of control and performance of your team ongoing.
In our Salesforce.com consulting, reports are key to developing the habits and driving towards results. The effectiveness of your process will rely on these. Here are some key reports which drive process effectiveness and organizational alignment:
Tracking User Tasks in Salesforce.com
Creating and completing tasks are the foundation of the Salesforce.com system. Your users need to continually be thinking of the next step. This should be tracked and reviewed as a team for task completion. The handoffs between team members within a sophisticated process will involve reliance on each person’s execution of their tasks.
If daily tasks are not completed, then the sales or operations process of your business will be affected by the bottlenecks. This accountability can be rolled up and made visible to all users to keep the team accountable.
Furthermore, the upcoming tasks assigned within your business processes for the coming week will help with load balancing the work within your team. If one person is overloaded, then tasks can be redistributed or a management decision to increase headcount will become apparent.
In the early stages, capturing notes within each completed task and auditing the activity records of Accounts, Opportunities or custom data objects will be valuable for an accounting of the work that was completed and by whom.
As your processes mature, you can shift the focus towards monitoring the activities of your team and looking for the bottlenecks within your business processes.
Pipeline And Opportunity Stages
Knowing what your sales looks like needs to be broken down by the next 90 days to six months of Opportunity Close Dates. You can further segment your reporting based on the Opportunity Stages that have been set up for your process. This will help to define what your pipeline forecasting will look like.
With a sales team, it is important to see who the top performers are and allow visibility for the entire team to see each other’s deals. This drives accountability and motivation.
Having weekly meetings early to test for the probabilities of Opportunities will allow for further refinement of the stages. Use this time to drive definition with your team on the various deal stages.
Operations Process Workflow In Salesforce.com
After the sale, you can use Salesforce.com to track how you deliver your products and services. This is typically done with custom data objects related to Opportunity records. As these objects are used for tracking the operations process, there should be stages of completion.
If your process involves a team approach, the progress of your jobs should be presented in a Salesforce.com report that shows the stages by people. This helps to reflect what the workload of team members are and the capacity of your delivery process. In a sense, it is real-time visibility into your factory and you can see the virtual assembly line.
Manage By Metrics
Without leadership and management by metrics, Salesforce.com quickly turns into a database focused on data rather than results. Reports clarify what is occurring and if your team is executing. Designing the business processes to be executed and measuring via real-time reports in Salesforce.com provides valuable feedback for making management decisions.
Be sure to review your reports and make them visible with your team. If they know you are reviewing metrics and using the data to make decisions, then the path to adoption becomes that much easier for your organization.
If you could know real-time information about your business, what would be important for you? Feel free to comment below.
