If Salesforce is your company’s CRM solution, you likely understand the value it brings to your organization as a whole. But most of the time, Salesforce is regarded as a necessary evil—even by those who live and breathe in it like I do. This somewhat negative perception is a result of underestimation of Salesforce’s capabilities, especially when it comes to reporting. There are many ways that you can optimize Salesforce, reporting being one of the major ones. Below are three major tips to help power up your reporting capabilities in Salesforce.
1. Utilizing standard, yet unconventional, reporting
A lot of basic reporting does not require diving into some of the more nitty-gritty standard reports that Salesforce provides, but they can be very insightful when used correctly. For example, at Seismic we use opportunity history reports for managing our conversion metrics, and providing insight into month-over-month stage conversion rates as well as open-to-close ratios, among many other sales statistics. This is a very under-utilized tool for metrics and as a result some smaller companies instead will pay a hefty, unnecessary monthly license cost for some other sales analytics platform. If you already have Salesforce, it makes no sense to tack on another solution cost.
2. Individual sales representative forecasting
With Salesforce, individual rep performance and forecasting has never been an easy task. The key here is to enable and use standard forecasting, but combine it with the power of reporting. Using just the Forecasts tab and interface is clean and simple, but doesn’t provide any overall team insights or graphed performance. With the combination of enabling forecasting, utilizing the individual rep’s user record to track sales targets, and using forecasting reports, you can really enhance your growth and forecasting reports.
3. Simple Campaign reporting with even simpler roll-up metrics
Seismic recently began using campaigns in Salesforce to measure our event performance for marketing. We wanted to take it one level deeper into the analysis and group our events by the vertical we sell to, such as sales enablement, financial services, etc. By utilizing the reporting formulas along with a great product called Roll-up Helper, which lives on the app exchange, we were able to easily gather and roll data into a parent campaign to be calculated and displayed in reporting. This helps us not only measure the benefit of specific events, but helps our marketing team quantify its efforts and contribution to the company over time.
Even if your entire day is spent in Salesforce, creating reports and presenting them to others in the company, there’s a good chance you’re under-utilizing Salesforce. Take your reports to the next level using these 3 simple tips.
