Last week’s post on planning an analytics strategy for sales outlined a series of steps organizations need to take in order to be fully leveraging customer data to make the best decisions.  Today, I’ll focus specifically on getting to the basic stage.  This may sound simple, but this stage is all about deeply understanding the things that sales teams care about, and then applying best practices for visual display to give the sales team simple effective tools that work the way they do.

With that in mind, here is a short overview of the process I follow when working with organizations that are struggling to get beyond using their CRM system as a data repository.

Identify the Questions Users Want to Ask of CRM Data

An analytics strategy must take into account that users are looking to both monitor their current state, and analyze the specific results.  The monitoring function is oriented around comparing the current state of performance against both stated and unstated goals.  The analysis function is oriented around drilling into the data to validate its accuracy and to gather clues as to how to improve performance.

Given this understanding of the fundamental role of reporting, it becomes critical to accurately detail the data that each community of users is looking to monitor and analyze, and deliver a concise package of reports tailored for each community’s role. 

The process for identifying the right data for each community is as much art as science.  My experience with Dynamics CRM is that there is no perfect requirements gathering template, and it is more effective to start by detailing the types of questions the reports are intended to answer.

In the majority of sales teams, the following questions have been identified as being critical to users.

Account Executives (In typical order of priority)

·         Am I on track to make my quota?

o   The user is looking to go to one location that will provide insight into the following pieces of information –

§  What has been the actual revenue booked for the closed months in the relevant period (QTD, YTD, HYTD) compared to my quota?

§  What is the forecast revenue for the open months in the relevant period (QTD, YTD, HYTD) compared to my quota?

·         What’s in my pipeline?

o   The user is looking to go to one location that will provide insight into the following pieces of information –

§  What deals are in front of me today that have forecast revenue commitments for the upcoming months?

§  Does CRM accurately reflect what I expect to close?

§  If I lose deal x but win deal y, am I still on track for the results I expect?

§  How much of the revenue in deals I’m working in is mine?

·         What deals will make or break my quarter?

·         Am I getting a good return on the clients where I invest my time?

·         How am I performing against organizational goals and past results?

o   What is my win rate relative to last year/my team/the overall organization?

o   What is my lead volume relative to last year/my team/the overall organization?

o   What is my average deal size?

Sales Managers (In typical order of priority)

·         What revenue will my team deliver this quarter?

o   What is the booked revenue for the months in the current period?

o   What is the forecast revenue for the months in the current period?

o   What deals will make or break this quarter? 

o   Are the hedge factors accurate on key deals?

o   What was in my pipeline last quarter at this time and what did we close?

·         How is my team’s pipeline trending quarter over quarter?

·         How effectively are we working with strategic accounts?

o   What revenue have we booked and do we have forecast for a specific account regardless of whether the deal is with them direct or via an agency?

o   Are we actively talking to key buyers at strategic accounts on a regular basis?

o   Is the size of our campaigns increasing?

·         How is my team performing against organizational goals and past results?

o   What’s our delivered revenue against plan?  Compared to last year?

o   What’s our Win Rate?  How does that compare to last year and to targets?

o   What’s our average campaign duration and dollar volume?  How does that compare to last year and to a target?

·         How productive are my Account Executives?

o   Which accounts are they active in?

o   Are some more active than others?

o   How effective are they at closing the leads they get?

This list of questions can now be used to drive the data that flows into mock ups as a designer is constantly checking this list and evaluating how well the mock up delivers answers to these questions.

What are the best practices for visual display that I should apply to answering these questions?

The following are a set of design considerations that we factor in when developing a mock up or beta report regardless of whether this is an operational report or dashboard.  The intent is to use these best practices to ensure that the users will easily and readily adopt the delivered dashboards.

Develop information dense displays

The delivered reports and dashboards should focus on delivering users as much information as is readable in one viewable area to allow the users to get as full an answer to the questions they were contemplating that lead them to run the report.  Note that this goal can be achieved to varying degrees depending on the selected platform. 

Select between charts and data tables based on the intended user

Visual report displays (charts and graphs) are particularly useful when rendering summarized information in the context of a target or trend to users who are not intimately familiar with the underlying rows of data.  Tables of data tend to be more useful when the intended audience has day to day working knowledge of the rows of data, and they intend to evaluate the appropriateness of each row while reviewing the report. 

Allow users to interact with the data to the extent they have a desire to

A core test of a reporting system is whether users are able to intuitively interact with the data to perform analysis without being forced to interact with the data in order to satisfy the initial question that brought them to run the report. 

Clearly identify data sources and calculations

Credibility in reporting systems is in large part derived from users understanding how charts and tables are derived for their transactional systems.  Therefore, it is essential that users interacting with the report can know immediately the source (or sources) of data, and can see the precise calculation performed in order to deliver any chart or data point.

Clearly identify the timeliness of the information

One goal of most reporting systems is to allow users to run reports at ad hoc intervals.  This puts great power at the finger tips of the users, but it creates confusion when two different users attempt to compare the same report run at different points in time.  Additionally, reports sometimes are sourced from multiple unique data stores with each data set updated at different intervals (i.e. CRM real time and the data warehouse nightly).  Given these discontinuities in time, it is highly beneficial to clearly state in the user interface the date through which the core data elements are up to date.

Insure the display can be viewed online, offline, or on paper

Not all users will interact with any given report in the same setting or for the same purposes.  This basic understanding leads to recognition that any published report should allow for a method through which uses can interact when they are online, when they are working with a laptop disconnected from the corporate network, and when they are meeting in a conference room entirely disconnected.

On my next post, I’ll round out this discussion with a couple of sample dashboards that deliver answers to the key questions and I believe deliver on the best practices for visual display identified above.