Track Business Outcomes
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Measure and validate business outcomes.
- Use the AppExchange to jumpstart your reports and dashboards.
Define Success Metrics
Now that you’ve learned about gathering feedback and measuring Salesforce usage, let’s talk about some metrics you can use to measure business outcomes. Sales data can guide you to sustained sales success, if you know how to separate the insights from the noise. It all starts with asking the questions that matter to your business and the associated metrics to help answer those questions.
Here are some sample questions and associated success metrics.
| Key Questions | Success Metrics |
|---|---|
| How is my team tracking with sales? |
Year-to-date (YTD) sales Quarter-to-date (QTD) sales Opportunity win/loss ratio for current and previous year |
| Do I have a sufficient pipeline? |
New business pipeline Pipeline by owner |
| What is the quality of my leads? |
Lead conversion rates Lead conversion rates by source |
| Are we remaining engaged with our customers? |
Accounts with no activities for the last 90 days |
Want more guidance? Use the worksheets in the Getting Started Workbook to outline what’s important for your company, the key questions you want to answer, and the associated metrics you can track in Salesforce. Make this your action plan for the metrics you need to create.
Reports and Dashboards
We’ve mentioned that you can find excellent dashboards on the AppExchange. Our expert partners have built hundreds for you to explore as you expand and grow your business.
Here are a few common categories to start with.
Ready to download a dashboard pack? Use these best practices.
- Install the dashboard in your sandbox environment or developer org, so you can explore it prior to installing the dashboard in your production instance.
- Customize the dashboards and underlying reports to meet your business needs. And delete them if they don’t!
- Once the dashboards are ready, communicate their availability to your stakeholders for review and feedback. Then consider holding informal training sessions to show people how to use them.
Validate Your Solution
At the end of the day, you need to make sure that your training strategy, feedback and support processes, and success metrics are working for your end users. It’s important to validate user adoption by testing their experience and getting their honest feedback so that you can continue to drive adoption.
Ask your end users:
- Is the training preparing you to do your job using Salesforce?
- Does the feedback process create engagement and trust?
- Do you feel supported?
- Are we measuring the right business outcomes?
In addition, validate that the business dashboards you created meet their needs. All this validation and testing will help you drive a successful rollout.