Drive Business with Insights from Salesforce Dashboards

With all the reporting functionality that Salesforce offers, how can sales teams best use the data to improve sales metrics? Join us to hear best practices from sales leaders at Aesynt, LegalZoom and Zenefits, three companies that have transformed their sales organisations and aren't scared to show us the numbers!

Analytics doesn’t just report what happened last week, last month, or last quarter. With Salesforce dashboard sales reporting software, analytics can actually drive the business. In this session of Dreamforce 2015 led by Shannon Mathews of Salesforce, a panel of 3 Salesforce customers explained how they used dashboard reporting to improve processes, meet goals, and move their company forward. The real-time sales data available on Salesforce dashboards gives companies increased visibility of real-time information, allowing the speed and agility necessary to refine business processes and therefore drive results.

Just like the dashboard in your car that monitors the automotive systems, dashboard reporting software gives an at-a-glance assessment of your business. Salesforce financial dashboard software has dashboard reporting tools to monitor your business and drive results.

Salesforce customers, Aesynt, Legal Zoom, and Zenefits shared ways their companies steer their business and solve problems through the sales reporting software Salesforce has available.

Mary Beth Gargani, Director of Sales Effectiveness at Aesynt, shared how using Salesforce dashboard reporting software to record results of their internal sales contest. The medication management company designed the contest to increase collaboration, therefore improving their culture, processes, and results of their organisation.

Aesynt uses Salesforce as their CRM platform. “Salesforce enables us, across our business, to more efficiently and more effectively manage our customer relationships,” explains Gargani. Utilising Salesforce dashboards and real time sales reporting was a natural way to help the company as they developed better business practices and worked to improve collaboration.

Gargani explains that employees were working hard but in different areas without collaboration. “It was compartmentalised,” says Gargani who wanted greater engagement and teamwork within the company. Gargani exploited love for sports and competition; the setup of the contest helped Aesynt employees focus a collaborative effort on sales and customer service, a behaviour Gargani wanted to instill in the Aesynt culture.

The gamification strategy, based on Fantasy Football in the fall and March Madness in the spring, had all customer engagement teams working together; teams were assigned irrespective of their organisational alignment. Each team was captained by a senior leader to get them involved with the conversations with customers and team members. The prize for the winning team was a healthy donation to a charity of the team’s choosing in addition to financial rewards.Videos, promotional signage in the office, and team meetings that started with “smack talk” going back and forth between the teams changed the fragmented culture to one of collaboration. Senior Management strongly supported the gamification, which also contributed to the success of the program because all company levels were involved.

By modifying existing Salesforce sales reporting software metrics, Salesforce dashboard reporting tools were customised to show weekly progress. Through Salesforce’s dashboard reporting software, employees could see on their how they competed against each other. Points were awarded not just for revenue but also for several other key metrics such as product mix and gross margin. Activities critical to the sales process were tracked across cross-functional teams, further increasing the spirit of collaboration and competition.

Not only did the program increase the spirit of collaboration, the gamification also helped make processes less lax by encouraging participants to entering data and correct measurements into the sales reporting software. Accurate data meant accurate dashboard reports. Aesynt found a key result of the program was including sales enablement departments that were never considered part of the sales process. The contest showed the importance of the “unsung heroes,” says Gargani.

The teams met their revenue goals through the gamification program but Aesynt also gained key information through the process, says Gargani. The program found processes that were critical but not being tracked as part of the sales cycle. The contest was a win: teams hit their revenue goals, the company made a nice donation to charity, worked out crisper processes, and transformed the culture of the company from disjointed to collaborative.

Legalzoom has been a Salesforce customer for 3 years and also uses Salesforce’s real-time sales reporting dashboards to gain speed and agility as well as to increase visibility of results. Eddie Choi, Director of Sales Operations, explains that prior to using Salesforce, getting reports and information was “painful,” taking a day or two to get reports to managers and sales reps. The company, which offers legal services to families and small businesses, gained speed and agility in their processes by using Salesforce dashboards. Currently, with Salesforce, Legalzoom gets metrics in real time.

Seeing is believing and data visibility is key for companies to be able to make decisions and course-corrections with speed and agility. Through Salesforce dashboard reporting tools and real-time sales reporting features, Legalzoom was able to create leaderboards for sales metrics and dashboards for KPIs including units, revenue, conversion rates, and average order value (AOV).

The real-time data of dashboards increased both visibility and agility. LegalZoom integrated Xactly into Salesforce to track compensation of their sales reps. With this sales rep reporting integration, explains Choi, the legal solutions company and its reps have better visibility for compensation and sales goals. With better visibility comes an increased ability to make course corrections towards goals.

Dashboards give visibility into compensation for contests and immediate bonuses or spiffs. Sales reps can set their personal goals based on what they want to make and track their progress to it. Sales rep reporting features of the Salesforce dashboard can show leaderboards which allow management to drive a particular behaviour across the sales group all at once. The real-time sales data of financial dashboard software from Salesforce allows managers and reps to react quickly to changing conditions.

LegalZoom also gained speed and agility by simplifying the process of handling calls. Choi describes how they are now able to log inbound calls and see where a customer is in the pipeline, a view they had not previously had. Utilisation of both inbound and outbound is reported and managers can see the floor averages.

LegalZoom optimises customer interactions through an infrastructure for lead scoring based on web interactions. This sales rep reporting feature allows LegalZoom reps to focus on more promising leads, increasing efficiency and productivity. “At LegalZoom we are constantly testing out new processes, new products. Having that real-time data allows us to pivot very quickly and allows us to figure out whether a new initiative is viable or not,” explains Choi. The real-time data of Salesforce’s dashboard reporting services gives businesses visibility and agility in meeting revenue goals.

Having real-time information has the ability to transform the company’s culture. Choi recounts that when LegalZoom transitioned to Salesforce, the real-time updates of the sales management reporting allowed for a much more dynamic sales team that can change initiatives as results come in.

Real-time sales management reporting offers real-time access to the data that allows LegalZoom to set goals and very closely monitor their progress to the goal, explains Choi. Through sales management reporting of Salesforce dashboards, sales can “measure themselves” with a reduced need for management interaction, says Choi. The dashboard can measure everything important to the company.

Bill Schwidder, the Vice President of Business Operations at Zenefits, also reports the ability for dashboards to drive visibility and agility in an organisation. “Salesforce creates next level visibility and agility for our rapidly expanding sales organisation,” explains Schwidder who set up his sales visibility reporting to send dashboard reports to his mobile phone first thing in the morning. These sales visibility reports can then be forwarded to other members of the management team.

The customisable Salesforce dashboard reporting tools contains the critical information Schwidder and his management team needs to know. Zenefits, an insurance broker providing technical solutions for HR and administrators, is growing by a factor of 10 every year. “When we’re growing so quickly, we don’t have the luxury of sitting back and saying we’re going to wait and see how this plays out,” says Schwidder who uses the real-time information on dashboard reports to do real-time course corrections.

Dashboards reports, says Schwidder, create visibility into the business performance, giving insights for discussion and debate. He uses dashboards to look for trends. For instance, he will see a call volume report and look for outliers and analyse them to see if it is a training issue, a sales execution issue, or a marketing issue. Once the cause is discovered, measures can be taken to correct the situation. Schwidder recommends analysing everything to control and track data points that are critical indicators of performance.

“The vision I have for my sales team,” Schwidder explains in this Dreamforce clip, “is for Salesforce to really be the centerpoint for everything they do throughout the day: every interaction, all the reports, how they manage their day is all done through Salesforce.” He recommends building cadence through automation and distributing daily dashboards to the executive team. Religiously using the sales reporting software can transform the company’s culture to a culture of responsibility, explains Schwidder.

Whether through gamification, real-time data of dashboards, or frequent dashboard reports throughout the day, sales visibility reporting can transform the company’s culture. Salesforce financial dashboard software reports give the visibility and agility to make data-based decisions and corrections quickly, driving the goals and revenue of the company.