Having an accurate visualization of your sales data means more powerful pipeline insights. It means people will listen to you, and you can skip bureaucracy to drive the bottom line forward and meet your quota.
What number can you hit? What deals can you close? What regions matter most today? Don’t limit your decision-making; for maximum sales results, optimize your performance dashboards with the utmost flexibility and finesse with six best practices.
In this whitepaper, you’ll learn new ways to enhance your sales performance dashboards in order to:
- Optimize visualizations for a single source of truth
- Quickly and accurately measure pipeline performance
- Choose the best metrics to measure your key performance indicators
- Make KPIs actionable, not just informative
- Empower yourself and your sales teams to ask and answer their own questions
We've also pulled out the first several pages of the whitepaper for you to read. Download the PDF on the right to read the rest.
1. Know Your Data
First things, first. Do you know your data? Where does your data live? What does it look like? Knowing your data is particularly important with a wealth of different opportunities to consider.
You need to connect to your pipeline and sales data in many ways-with spreadsheets, databases, cubes, Hadoop and of course, Salesforce. You may find several options to bring data directly into Salesforce, but don't forget about additional data like market sizing, sales quotas, region or demographics.
Your sales systems may not capture all transactions, or you may not be able to attribute results to individual sales people in a team-selling environment. Sales people may be inconsistent in how they record calls and emails. Some of your sales data may be hours, days or even weeks late, or subject to change due to processing errors. If it takes a while to measure something, you may have already misinterpreted your data, or worse, misperformed for the quarter.
Knowing is everything.
Amylin Pharmaceuticals is a bio-pharmaceutical company dedicated to improving lives by discovering, developing and commercializing innovative medicines. Amylin uses sources like MySQL and Infobright to stage a lot of information. It houses sales activity, prescription data, demographic information, even census information to look at commercial models to help them determine how to augment and size their sales teams. In terms of size, they have at least 100 million records of data.
Danielle Miller, Manager of Sales Operation at Amylin needed her teams to be able to see and understand all of this data with dashboards optimized for making swift decisions.
"Our sales force was going out there making calls every day, but had no idea when they'd hit our region frequency. When you can put that in a meaningful dashboard and show them the deficit in particular areas of doctors they may not be reaching-that was an 'a-ha' moment. We weren't trying to slap them down and say, 'you need to make more calls,' but rather, 'Hey, look at this, here's a visualization that shows how you're managing your territory and what's going on in there,'" Miller said.
Aligning organizational data in visual dashboards as a single-source of truth has transformed analysis, and this newfound data transparency has drastically improved sales operations at Amylin.
Want to read more? Download the rest of the whitepaper!
