Four quick ways Salesforce CRM Analytics can help drive top-line growth
If you’re a Salesforce user, you may be aware of a native analytics product on the platform called CRM Analytics. The product provides some services you might expect, such as visualizing performance through interactive charts and helping transform data to better fit a business need. However, it also offers additional features, such as integrating third-party data sources with your Salesforce data and building artificial intelligence models that can forecast results. The fact that CRM Analytics is native to the platform means that it can be embedded into your normal workflow or allow you to action directly on Salesforce objects.
CRM Analytics offers numerous opportunities for customization, and has broad potential across industries and product lines, but you don’t need to be a tech specialist to benefit from it. There are some simple and fast self-service capabilities that can help drive team performance by using prebuilt templates and out-of-the-box functionality.
Here are four quick ways you can bring data transparency and measurement to your users by using CRM Analytics:
1. Embed analytics content in the pages you already use
Is Salesforce embedded in your team’s workflow? Do you already have a set routine? Do you live and breathe an opportunity report page? With CRM Analytics, you don’t need to send everyone to a separate page to get insights – you can embed them into pages co-located with your standard Salesforce content and reports. Here are three strategies you can use:
Add a header to each opportunity page
Are you getting the impression opportunity data is stale? The Customer Insights Opportunity Embedded Dashboard adds summary statistics for each opportunity at the top of the page, so you don’t have to read reams of data to discern trends. Metrics include age during stage, activity times and probability of win. There’s even a helpful wizard to help you set it up and drop it into place.
Add summarized statistics to your account pages
Want to see individual account performance metrics on each of your account pages? Use the embedded account dashboard, which can add a variety of widgets such as average sales cycle, opportunity counts and win rate. You can even add metrics beyond sales such as open service tickets, depending on your Salesforce instance setup.
Summarize opportunity trends in a waterfall chart
Are you looking at different opportunity table reports? Are you finding it hard to discern patterns? One popular trend with our clients is using a waterfall chart, but these can sometimes be painful to build and maintain in business intelligence products. CRM Analytics has a preconfigured waterfall template ready to use. See how the pipeline changes between two periods of performance. Use the page to filter content by selecting a stage, and watch your opportunities in the table filter to that selection.
2. Create pages to help monitor group performance
If you want to see how your organizational performance compares to your strategic goals, or want to have a series of charts that can interact with each other, you can create dedicated pages to review your company or team’s performance. The Customer Insights Sales Performance Dashboard offers a template that provides a holistic view of the organization, including individual opportunity performance. It allows you to see where leads are coming from, how your opportunities are translating into wins and which teams are leading the charge.
Why templates can help
Templates and their accompanying wizards can act as quick mechanisms to introduce new analytics capabilities to your teams. There are dozens of pre-built templates available, for example:
- Team leaderboard templates let your hyper-competitive sales reps know where they stand at any given moment
- Revenue Intelligence offers a series of prepackaged templates to help monitor organizational sales performance. It can cover pipeline, lead generation, quota attainment, leader boards and more.
Salesforce templates are all adaptable so that you can customize them to fit your needs. If you’re looking for more bespoke analysis, our advisory teams can build content specific to your personal needs and match the business workflow.
3. Get notifications when events happen
If there is an issue with sales performance, you want to know early so you can apply strategic aid in the direction of assistance. Salesforce can provide alert notifications on web or mobile based on event triggers. A common example is when results by a certain day in the quarter are off target by a predetermined percentage amount. You can set up automated notifications in the form of an email, through the notification icon in Salesforce, using the iOS app to enable alerts or via conditional formatting on the dashboard itself after a threshold is met.
4. Build a mobile app for analytics
If you’ve built an analytics app in CRM Analytics, but your sales reps are on the go more than they’re at their desks, you can quickly create a mobile version for them. By adding a mobile template to your pre-existing web or desktop app, you can view all the same data on a cell phone, without needing to build anything from scratch. The app will do the work, so all you need to do is download the Salesforce app on your phone and connect to your organization. You’ll have all the data ready to go, whenever you need it.
These are just some simple tricks to help you along your way. Want to learn more on how to enable analytics in your Salesforce workflow? PwC is here to help you on your journey.
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