Reporting and Dashboards - Successforce Blog

Service and Support Dashboard on the AppExchange

I noticed that there was a pretty good Service and Support dashboard posted on the AppExchange. It tracks things like service quality, customers and channels, and agent productivity. It’s a great starting point for building your own dashboards. You can download it for free from the AppExchange and the whole installation process takes less than two minutes. Once you have it set up in your org, you can drill down into the reports, see how they were set up, and tweak them to fit the needs of your business.

I’d love to see more of these dashboards for things like Sales, Marketing, and Competitive Intelligence. Does anyone have a good dashboard they’d like to share? Publish it on the AppExchange and we'll write it up.

Service and Support Dashboard on the AppExchange

I noticed that there was a pretty good Service and Support dashboard posted on the AppExchange. It tracks things like service quality, customers and channels, and agent productivity. It’s a great starting point for building your own dashboards. You can download it for free from the AppExchange and the whole installation process takes less than two minutes. Once you have it set up in your org, you can drill down into the reports, see how they were set up, and tweak them to fit the needs of your business.

I’d love to see more of these dashboards for things like Sales, Marketing, and Competitive Intelligence. Does anyone have a good dashboard they’d like to share? Publish it on the AppExchange and we'll write it up.

Quick Win to Reduce Channel Conflict

Deal registration is a PRM (partner relationship management) strategy used to reward partners for early registration of approved deals. There are many ways to make this a reality using Salesforce.com. One cost effective way is to use web 2 lead. This feature offers an extensible way to capture partner deal registrations and extend your enterprise to your partners.

Here is a link to a customer that is benefiting from a salesforce driven deal registration program: Click here for F5 Networks Web 2 Lead Deal Registration Form. You can see the types of questions this company requires its partners to answer in order to have their deal registrations approved. Using custom fields, page layouts, record types, web 2 lead, workflow, assignment rules, and reports/dashboards, this company is able to reduce channel conflict, increase channel revenues, and improve partner loyalty. Here is a sample dashboard showing the result of partner deal registrations. This dashboard demonstrates the benefits of having an integrated SFA and PRM system. If you're interested in some guidance or support to set up your own deal registration program feel free to contact product management at Salesforce.

Quick Win to Reduce Channel Conflict

Deal registration is a PRM (partner relationship management) strategy used to reward partners for early registration of approved deals. There are many ways to make this a reality using Salesforce.com. One cost effective way is to use web 2 lead. This feature offers an extensible way to capture partner deal registrations and extend your enterprise to your partners.

Here is a link to a customer that is benefiting from a salesforce driven deal registration program: Click here for F5 Networks Web 2 Lead Deal Registration Form. You can see the types of questions this company requires its partners to answer in order to have their deal registrations approved. Using custom fields, page layouts, record types, web 2 lead, workflow, assignment rules, and reports/dashboards, this company is able to reduce channel conflict, increase channel revenues, and improve partner loyalty. Here is a sample dashboard showing the result of partner deal registrations. This dashboard demonstrates the benefits of having an integrated SFA and PRM system. If you're interested in some guidance or support to set up your own deal registration program feel free to contact product management at Salesforce.

Partner Visibility App Launched by Sigmatrak

Point of Sale (POS) data is the holy grail of channel management. Sigmatrak has successfully solved this age old mystery with their B2B messaging appliance. Their equipment improves the accuracy and consistency of data that is passed between trading partners. Now, the data that is processed, is integrated with Salesforce and is mapped to partner and customer accounts. Using Sigmatrak and Salesforce.com together, empowers sales and channel executives to know exactly what their partners are selling and who they are selling to. Channel sales activity is analyzed, inventory levels are tracked, and rebate claims are reconciled. Click here to take a test drive or install this AppExchange application. I really like the service monitor feature which demonstrates, on a Google Map, the locations of the messaging appliance within a partner community. It really brings the idea of a channel coverage map to life. Imagine having this powerful data and appliance inside your Salesforce.com system?

Partner Visibility App Launched by Sigmatrak

Point of Sale (POS) data is the holy grail of channel management. Sigmatrak has successfully solved this age old mystery with their B2B messaging appliance. Their equipment improves the accuracy and consistency of data that is passed between trading partners. Now, the data that is processed, is integrated with Salesforce and is mapped to partner and customer accounts. Using Sigmatrak and Salesforce.com together, empowers sales and channel executives to know exactly what their partners are selling and who they are selling to. Channel sales activity is analyzed, inventory levels are tracked, and rebate claims are reconciled. Click here to take a test drive or install this AppExchange application. I really like the service monitor feature which demonstrates, on a Google Map, the locations of the messaging appliance within a partner community. It really brings the idea of a channel coverage map to life. Imagine having this powerful data and appliance inside your Salesforce.com system?

Reporting Success Benchmark

Successbenchmarkreports_1 In October we introduced a new success benchmark around custom reports. To get the most out of salesforce.com it’s vital that your reps have the confidence to build their own reports and tweak them over time.

To train your reps we recommend that you require them to start with three simple reports.

Build a list of contacts and accounts using salesforce.com
Set up a report to display your tasks and completed activities
Create a customized report listing the opportunities in your pipeline

As a manager or salesforce.com administrator it’s worth taking 20 minutes out of your team meeting to go through this exercise step-by-step and answer any questions they might have. Once they’ve set up a report, have them click “save as.” Explain that they can save reports to public folders which everyone can see or private folders which only they have access to. For the purposes of this exercise have them add it to “My Personal Custom Reports Folder.”

Reporting Success Benchmark

Successbenchmarkreports_1 In October we introduced a new success benchmark around custom reports. To get the most out of salesforce.com it’s vital that your reps have the confidence to build their own reports and tweak them over time.

To train your reps we recommend that you require them to start with three simple reports.

Build a list of contacts and accounts using salesforce.com
Set up a report to display your tasks and completed activities
Create a customized report listing the opportunities in your pipeline

As a manager or salesforce.com administrator it’s worth taking 20 minutes out of your team meeting to go through this exercise step-by-step and answer any questions they might have. Once they’ve set up a report, have them click “save as.” Explain that they can save reports to public folders which everyone can see or private folders which only they have access to. For the purposes of this exercise have them add it to “My Personal Custom Reports Folder.”

Create Groupings Using Custom Formula Fields

The Summer ’05 release has already started to change the way I analyze data in salesforce.com, bringing forward trends that were once hard to distinguish.

The first formula I’ve started using is a simple average calculation. For example, you might want to divide the number of employees by the number of users to calculate your penetration in an account.

{!Number_Users} / {!Number_Employees}

Note that that you'll have to substitute your custom fields when building this formula but it shows you the basic design pattern.

This calculation is very similar to the way analysts do a Price/Earnings ratio so that they can get an apples to apples comparison.

I’ve also found that I’m using custom formula fields helps with categorization. For example, on the account record you might have the number of employees but for reporting purposes you want to create buckets. To do so you can create a nested if statement that looks something like this.

IF({!Employees} = 0, "",

IF({!Employees} <50, "Tier 1",

IF({!Employees} <= 200, "Tier 2",

IF({!Employees} <=500, "Tier 3",

IF( {!Employees} <= 1,000, "Tier 4", "Tier 5")))))

With these two data points you can create a report to measure penetration at different tiers. I’ve left the stage, summary fields, and tier thresholds blank but it should be enough to spark some ideas for your organization.

To learn more about how custom formula fields work, I highly recommend Getting Started with Custom Formula Fields presentation and the Custom Formula Field Blog.