Uncategorized May 14, 2020
Modern business intelligence (BI) is founded on data analytics and predictive modeling. Many BI systems’ core functions would be impossible for businesses to execute on their own, as they depend on vast amounts of data storage and impressive processing capabilities. A single desktop or server in the break room simply isn’t enough. As a result, many businesses use cloud-based solutions, such as Salesforce, to manage their business intelligence reporting operations.
Salesforce is the CRM of choice for over 150,000 businesses. Many of these businesses take advantage of Salesforce’s deep customization capabilities and easy integration with common back-end cloud applications to use Salesforce as a command center for their day-to-day operations and business intelligence reporting.
And of course, every command center needs a control panel. In Salesforce, the system’s “control panel” is its dashboard.
According to Salesforce’s knowledge base:
“Dashboards help you visually understand changing business conditions so you can make decisions based on the real-time data you have gathered with reports. Use dashboards to help users identify trends, sort out quantities, and measure the impact of their activities.”
Salesforce’s business intelligence dashboard is highly customizable. You can use its default metrics or create your own with custom formulas. You can even toggle between multiple dashboard displays to easily assess the performance of different parts of your business.
Since Salesforce is primarily used as a customer relationship management (CRM) system, most of the headline metrics — those critical to day-to-day or ongoing operations — are tailored to your business’ sales and marketing departments.
Salesforce recommends you keep in mind the following considerations when creating your dashboard:
It can be easy to go overboard with dozens of charts tracking dozens of metrics. However, you’ll want to limit the data visualizations on your primary dashboard to no more than five or six. These are your key performance indicators, or KPIs. Your KPIs may change based on your role and what your company sells, but you should be able to fit your top KPIs on a single, clean, and easy-to-read primary dashboard.
Salesforce makes it easy to create your own dashboard. If you manage a large business department (or the entire company), you might wind up using several dashboards to track company performance on both a macro and micro level.
If you’re not sure which KPIs to use in you business intelligence reporting, don’t worry. We’ll explain KPIs for multiple roles, so you and your team can make sure you’re watching the numbers that really matter.
Salesforce was originally developed to help salespeople track and manage their leads — it’s the company name, after all. But years of improvements, extensions, and new services have made the Salesforce CRM into one of multiple spokes on the Salesforce hub. Let’s run through the KPIs that matter most for various corporate roles, starting with…
The sales department, in most companies, bears ultimate responsibility for driving sales and revenue growth to their organization. Sales KPIs might include:
Sales and marketing go hand in hand, and they share similar KPIs. However, marketing departments can wind up tracking a dizzying array of different metrics if they’re active on many digital channels. Marketing is an expense on a company’s income statement, so good marketing departments work to make those expenses as worthwhile as possible, through KPIs like:
Marketing departments often analyze these numbers on a campaign-by-campaign basis as well, to uncover the most effective tactics and discard whatever isn’t working.
Someone has to make sure the bills get paid and the customers pay up. Finance departments are responsible for money flowing into and out of their companies, and as such must keep an eagle eye on a number of financial KPIs, some of which will wind up on earnings reports for public companies. Here are just a few finance KPIs:
Sales, marketing, and finance are all about financial efficiency. Human resources, on the other hand, needs to ensure their company’s employees are working efficiently. The markers of efficiency can vary by business model. Companies with a large hourly workforce will track performance differently than companies with mostly salaried employees. However, there are some common KPIs used by many human resources departments:
Your business intelligence dashboard will be as unique as your company and your role within it. The KPIs mentioned here are simply common metrics we’ve seen companies use on their Salesforce dashboards. Many companies go beyond these KPIs and drill deeper into the vast reservoir of data Salesforce can create every day. Many more, unfortunately, aren’t quite sure where to begin with business intelligence.
If you need a trusted partner in Salesforce implementation, one with extensive experience setting up business intelligence dashboards, talk to us. We’ll work together to make your Salesforce data work better for you.
Contact us to talk about how we can help.