Salesforce Best Practices: Three Dashboards to Virtually Manage Remote Sales Teams
Summary: Organizations with a clear view of the data in their CRM will be at a significant advantage while we work virtually and navigate the upheaval of quarantine. Three sales management dashboards can provide this clear view, filtering out the noise, letting teams stay laser-focused on what’s most important. These three dashboards are:
Lead and Opportunity Management
Sales Team Activities
Key Performance Indicators for Leadership Dashboard
Read below for more detail on how your team can implement and use them.
Effectively Managing a Remote Sales Team
Those of us who are far from the frontlines are trying our best to navigate the uncertainty of the current climate while keeping up with our work commitments. It’s certainly a challenging time. We all want to be sensitive to the immediate needs of our communities and customers. We also want to do everything we can to meet the goals we set before coronavirus became the constant concern it is now.
From a sales and sales management perspective, CRMs like Salesforce have never been more mission-critical. While many of us have kept notes and tasks in personal productivity tools like Evernote and on personal calendars, now is the time to break that habit.
Having streamlined information that remote teams can access quickly and efficiently is no longer desirable as an organization in the 21st century — it’s absolutely necessary to navigate the upheaval we’ve all experienced as this pandemic sweeps the globe.
As the saying goes, if it isn’t in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist. For teams now reliant on remote collaboration and virtual communication, this can’t be emphasized enough. Fostering data transparency and visibility is an essential business need now that teams are dispersed. It’s one that sales management should reinforce the importance of regularly.
The great news is that Salesforce can measure anything there are fields for in your system. That means that you can tailor your reports and dashboards for the specific KPIs that your organization values most.
There’s never been a more important time to make sure your sales team and sales processes are firing on all cylinders. For sales management, we’ve found the following Salesforce dashboards give the ideal snapshot of what your organization needs to monitor the most.
1. Lead and Opportunity Management Dashboard
Harnessing the information at the top of your funnel is a natural starting point. By visualizing this data, you can see what’s in your sales pipeline in a clear way. The different components of this dashboard can be organized by stage, giving a quick overview of what your team can anticipate landing and when.
You can easily download and install a basic lead and opportunity management dashboard from the AppExchange if there isn’t one in your Salesforce org. It’s a simple dashboard that will pull from the standard fields and objects within salesforce.com. There’s no configuration needed to get it up and running, which is great news when time is of the essence.
Of course, to get value out of this dashboard, you’ll want to align it with your organization’s sales cycle and sales process as much as possible. What matters to a B2C organization may be very different from what matters to a B2B organization, so consider the out of the box options a starting point.
We always recommend aligning the technology with your organization’s specific needs. Doing so minimizes the need to translate your CRM data. It also maximizes your investment in Salesforce as an ecosystem of CRM tools.
Useful Dashboard Components Include:
Leads created
Opportunities created
Sales pipeline by stage
Sales pipeline by rep
New accounts this month
Sales by product
Sales goals vs. closed won actuals
Closed lost vs. closed won
Questions you’ll want to consider when building this out include:
What sales goals need to be present?
How should you represent the composition of the sales team and individual goals?
What metrics do your reps need visualized?
What metrics does management need visualized?
How do those interact?
What measurements should be taken into account when reviewing the pipeline?
How do you want to show progress towards goals?
What revenue metrics should exist on this dashboard as opposed to the KPIs dashboard?
2. Sales Team Activities Dashboard
Now more than ever, you’ll want to see how your team is moving deals through the pipeline and a sales team activities dashboard is a great way to see this information. From sales calls to scheduled meetings, this dashboard shows the actions your team is taking and can be measured by whatever increment of time is most useful for you.
This dashboard helps you capture efficiencies in the process that can streamline your sales reps’ efforts, allowing them to sell more in less time. With life feeling so suddenly upended for so many of us, these kinds of efficiencies are crucial to capture as an advocate for your team. Help them work smarter rather than harder by reviewing this dashboard regularly.
The components of this dashboard and its layout will depend on what’s most important to your organization and sales team. It bears repeating that the technology is only as good as its representation of your actual business, otherwise what is your CRM data really showing?
Useful Dashboard Components Include:
Lead calls MTD
Sales meetings MTD
Today’s created activities
Today’s closed activities
Activities completed MTD
Overdue activities
Questions you’ll want to consider when building this out include:
What reports do you most regularly pull?
Which data points show up most often in those reports?
What metrics are most regularly reviewed in sales team meetings?
What metrics are most regularly reviewed in one-on-one meetings?
What is the makeup of your sales team? Do you have multiple teams like inside sales and field sales?
As you do your research and look at dashboard samples, start to build your own. Remember that perfection is the enemy of progress — you’ll likely start using this dashboard and find it needs adjustments and additions as it becomes a regular point of reference.
Sales Activities Example Dashboard
3. Key Performance Indicators for Leadership
This one may seem redundant at first as it will draw from some of the same fields that feed other sales dashboards. This is by design though, because this dashboard is the one-stop-shop for the KPIs your leadership team cares about most.
Rather than cherry picking from other dashboards, this one provides a clear, concise view of the vital business information needed to make key decisions about the business.
Much has been written about the importance of leadership making informed, expedient decisions — this dashboard is designed to be everything your team will need to do just that. In times of economic uncertainty, it’s even more important for this dashboard to be aligned with your specific business needs.
Useful Dashboard Components Include:
Leads added
Opportunities created
FY opportunities by schedule
Sales goals by actuals
Earned revenue goal by quarter
Earned revenue MTD
Earned revenue YTD
Schedule (forecast and actual)
Questions you’ll want to consider when building this out include:
What data points and metrics do you review most regularly?
What does leadership need to know from a sales performance standpoint to make informed decisions?
What do you currently refer to and is there anything that is just noise?
What revenue metrics matter most?
How do you measure the health of your business? What would need to be included to grade that health?
Of course, there are many other questions that could be answered in this process. We highly recommend keeping things simple and starting with the minimum viable product — what dashboard components can get you up to speed immediately?
Once you’ve got something built, you can spend time customizing and fine-tuning it for your business. Don’t let perfection get in the way of progress.
How Cloud Giants Uses Dashboards
There are many ways dashboards can help you keep tabs on your business. At Cloud Giants, we use different dashboards to track client progress, ensure we stay on top of sales, and monitor leadership metrics.
Defining these vital business metrics and building dashboards that visualize them is half the battle. Once they’re built, it’s important to reinforce behaviors around them.
To do this, we include dashboard review to the weekly meeting agendas during which they need to be reviewed. That way, we know there’s dedicated time for us to review the data as a team, decide what action needs to be taken (if any), and determine a plan for that action.
With the right metrics tracked on our key dashboards, regularly scheduled review, and actionable follow up, we know we’re making the best decisions we can based on our business data.
Ready to get started with the right dashboards?
Salesforce has some great out of the box options you can download and add to your organization’s CRM. Click here to start the process.
Not sure your team is routinely tracking the right metrics? We’re available to talk out strategy and technical questions — no strings attached. Give us a call at 919-578-7711 or email info@cloudgiants.com to set up a time.
We want to offer our support, especially while everything is feeling a little upended. If we can offer any complimentary guidance to help you navigate this tough time, we’d love to do our part.