One key challenge for almost all CRM implementations is driving adoption by sales representatives.  In the past, I've found that having user dashboards that provide insight into adoption metrics can be an effective way to highlight patterns of usage within an organization or a team, and usage dashboards provide a vehicle for managers to drive adoption.

It's somewhat difficult to say how a user adoption dashboard should function for any given organization, but there are a handful of principles that I've used in the past -

1.  Specifically identify the most meaningful activities that sales representatives should be engaging in and measure them.  For many organizations this will be a combination of the following -

• New Contacts Created - Are sales representatives actively adding contacts to the system?
• New Opportunities - Are sales representatives actively creating new deals?
• Activities - Are sales representatives tracking and managing their emails and appointments in CRM?

2.  Track trends - A current measure can be useful, but managers will be much more capable of driving adoption if they can see the patter of usage and whether it is moving up or down or staying flat for any given team or user.

3.  Provide a rollup and drill down capability - In order for the metrics to be meaningful, managers and users must have the ability to look at their teams as a whole, or individuals from within that team.  This provides the ability to dynamically compare and contrast how users and groups are performing.

4.  Provide the ability to extract the raw data - Credibility is derived from transparency.  Managers are much more willing to trust the data if they have access to the raw data, and they are much more likely to actively drive adoption if they know the hard numbers are there to back them up.

With these examples in mind, I've provided a simple sample below.  This is by no means the best approach for any given organization, but it's an attempt to bring some of these ideas to life in a simple interface that allows a user to see both a rollup and drill down view of adoption. 

Click here for a full page example.

One final note on this example.  The upper right chart is a composite metric that sums up an overall score based on a user's inserted contacts, appointments, and the fact that they are not neglecting existing opportunities and accounts.  Composite metrics can be a simple way to rollup an overall score, but they should be used with caution because it's easy to get carried away and leave a meaningless measure that users don't understand.