Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

5 simple steps to reports and dashboardsReports and dashboards show how you performed in the past and what’s happening at the moment—they’re key to driving success and adoption for any CRM project. The information provided by reports anddashboards is especially important in today’s environment, where it’s critical to be proactive, rather thanreactive, in your approach. You want to be able to spot trends and act on them immediately.For example, a sales organization wants to know which deals were lost, which competitors are gainingground, and whether the average time to close is increasing or decreasing.For a customer service organization, it’s important to track the averagedays or time to close and satisfaction. And marketing organizations wantto track campaign effectiveness and ROI.To make the most of Salesforce CRM’s reporting capabilities, it’simportant to plan carefully and then follow these 5 proven steps to makingreports and dashboards part of your business process:1. Know what keeps your executives up at night2. Capture the right data3. Build your reports4. Build your dashboards5. Use data to change behavior and drive resultsAbstractTo track and improve business performance,you need reports that show trends as well asreal-time dashboards for up-to-the minuteinformation about your business. SalesforceCRM makes it easy to create both.By Leahanne MerrittStep #1: Know what keeps your executives up at nightFinding answers to critical business questions and making good decisions is vital to executives—and totheir companies’ success and competitive position:• Ask questions and start at the top – When designing reports and dashboards, first define what yourexecutives—your CEO; the VPs of Sales, Marketing, Support; and your channels—need to know to runtheir business. What are their key metrics? What behaviors do they want to encourage?• Align metrics with your company vision – Take your business objectives, determine the metrics thatmeasure those objectives, and map those metrics to the capabilities of Salesforce CRM. For example, ifforecasting and tracking large deals are important to the VP of Sales, make sure you understand the keydata points that give insight into those tasks and the best frequency for reporting that data. Or if your VPof Marketing needs to track response rates, sales, trials, meetings, or campaign awareness, you need tocapture that data at the campaign, campaign member, lead, and opportunity level to return meaningfulmetrics.Tip: Salespeople thrive on competition. If you make it possible to track their progress in relation to theirpeers, your overall adoption rates will go up.