10 sales & pipeline charts that should be on your salesforce.com dashboard

Improving visibility of sales performance is the number one reason that organisations invest in salesforce.com Sales Cloud licences.  And yet many of these same organisations under achieve in this important benefit by failing to make the best use of the salesforce.com reports and dashboards capabilities.

So here are 10 simple charts that we think should be on the dashboard for any sales executive. In the interests of brevity we've ignored variations in these charts that provide additional insight by product, campaign, territory and so on. The purpose here is to provide the core building blocks from which organisation-specific reporting needs can be addressed.

1. Closed Won Opportunities by Month

This is the most basic graph and the most essential but the trick here - as with many of the charts - is to create the chart as a stacked bar chart and the underlying report as Matrix report.

Sure it's slightly easier to create a Summary report but it's only a small step further to create a Matrix report. And the results are so much more powerful.

2. Pipeline Opportunities by Close Date and Opportunity Stage

This chart gives the fundamental information necessary to assess the pipeline. Stacking the bar chart by Stage gives high quality visibility of the overall health of the pipeline.

Now we can start to interrogate the data. For example, assuming we're in February 2012, is the deal that shows in Negotiation in June really going to take 5 months to complete? Perhaps it is, but now we have the information necessary to question the situation. Similarly, the deal that shows as Prospecting in February - are we really going to close it this month? In reality is it at a more advanced Stage?  Or does it belong in a later month?

3. Trend in Pipeline 'As-At' the 1st of each Month

The Pipeline Opportunities by Close Date above shows the pipeline at any given point in time. But what about the trend in the pipeline? Is it increasing or decreasing? 

The pipeline As-At report shows the size of the pipeline "As-At" the 1st of each month and thus the overall trend in the size of the pipeline.

Formatting the graph and underlying report by Stage gives us additional insight on the make-up of the pipeline. 

4. Open Opportunities by Created Date

The size of the pipeline is a key driver of future sales performance. But size isn't everything – we also need to measure quality.

The Open Opportunities by Created Date chart is one important way to do this.

If it typically takes three months to close a deal in your organisation yet there a number of Opportunities opened significantly earlier than this, are these really genuine, viable opportunities? In the chart above what about the opportunities opened in February and June? Are we confident they're legitimate Opportunities and not being regularly moved along in order to maintain the size of the pipeline? 

5. Stage Movement Report

High quality visibility of sales trends and sales performance means require sales people use salesforce.com to manage deals throughout the sales process. As such we should see the majority of Opportunities moving successively through each Opportunity Stage.

The Opportunity Stage Movement Report shows, for any given time period, what has happened to Opportunities. For example, in the chart and table below, we can see that of the 335 Opportunities that were in the Prospecting Stage, 85 have moved onto the Investigation Stage and so on.

The chart shows that a successively reduced number of Opportunities move into Closed Lost as they progress through the Opportunity Stages – this is what we'd expect.

However 28 Opportunities moved from Prospecting directly Closed Won. Depending on the nature of your business this might be an acceptable ratio – after all, some deals do close almost immediately. But an excessive number of Opportunities following this pattern might indicate sand-bagging by the sales team – in other words, keeping deals out of salesforce.com until the last moment. At the very least, if Opportunities aren't moving successively through the sales process then the sales manager is losing valuable insight into the pipeline and sales performance.

6. Opportunity Conversion Ratio

Small increases in the percentage of opportunities that convert into closed deals has a disproportionally high impact on overall sales revenue. It's one of the key levers available to sales managers.

This Opportunity Conversion Ratio chart and report show the percentage conversion rate on opened Opportunities over time.

The chart and table provide valuable information on sales performance and potential training and development needs. We need to assess this information in the context of other graphs – for example the Opportunities Opened by Created Date in order to ensure it doesn't reflect sales people only entering opportunities into the system that they're confident are going to close.

7. Average Size of Closed Deals

In many organisations the ability to consistently cross-sell or up-sell is a key driver of incremental sales revenue. The Average Size of Closed Deals chart gives important insight on how well sales people are achieving this over a given period of time.

The report is a key enabler in identifying sales people that are effective in cross selling or upselling. What can we learn from their expertise?  Can other sales people benefit from additional training or copying the leaders' techniques? Are those with the lowest average deal size the sales people that are consistently giving away the biggest discounts?

8. Top Five Clients and Prospects

The Top Five Clients and Prospects table gives a clear indication of where managers should be spending their time over the coming months.

Displaying this information on a dashboard table is a good way of focussing attention. Limit the results to the top 5, 10 or 15 in order to prioritise the key accounts. On the report list all the Accounts with open opportunities.

9. Completed Activities per Sales Person and Team.

Sales deals don't close themselves. Tracking the number of completed activities can provide valuable insight into varying levels of performance. This is especially the case when viewed in conjunction with the other metrics outlined in this paper.

Effective use of this chart and report requires a few small configuration changes to Activities within salesforce.com. Firstly, modify the Activity Type picklist to suit your organisation and make it mandatory. Then make the Due Date mandatory to ensure that Users can't leave the date blank.

10. Sales Performance versus Target

There are three ways to manage sales performance against target in salesforce.com.

• Use the Forecasts tab and associated functionality.
• Use a custom object to record targets and link Opportunities to the relevant target.
• Use a gauge on a dashboard.

The last of these is the most simple and the one that is demonstrated below.

The upside of this approach is that it's very easy and simple to implement. The downside is that it gives the least amount of insight of the three solutions, but that may be an acceptable price to pay (in the short term at least) for ease of implementation.

There are several additional ways to manage targets in salesforce.com that provide additional insight. Watch out for a forthcoming SolX blog post on using salesforce.com to manage targets.

SUMMARY

No single metric is king – effective management of sales teams requires analysis of performance across a number of measures. So in this post we've aimed to illustrate the most important set of basic reports that can easily be configured to produce valuable insight into sales performance.

It's not an exhaustive list and we welcome your feedback! 

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Posted in: dashboards, forecasts, opportunities, reports, sales manager, sales performance, salesforce