Salesforce
Salesforce
Dashboard ANALYTICS tips
DASHBOARD FILTERS
dynamic dashboards
Developing the perfect table
We recently polled our customers to gauge the pain point they wanted to address by hiring/creating a sales operations team.
The top reason was due to a lack of accessible data in Salesforce. While many sales leaders admit that they know the data resides in Salesforce, most had to still pull it into an excel sheet and run some pivot tables and create graphs.
When you do a time calculation, most sales operations analysts spend 15-20 hours a week exporting data out of Salesforce and transforming it into a presentable deck. All because executives using Salesforce don’t have the time to click through multiple isolated reports. They need the ability to see all their relevant data in the same place, so they can quickly compare metrics from across their organization and spot significant trends.
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A Salesforce dashboard provides exactly that — if developed correctly. However, the best functionality of these dashboards may not be readily apparent to new users. Here are some things you can do to take your dashboards to the next level. We recommend switching to Lightning when trying these out, as many of these tips work best in that interface.
Setting up filters for your dashboards.
One view is rarely enough for the data-driven executive! Their businesses are multi-faceted, and they expect their reporting to reflect this complexity. Luckily, Salesforce Lightning’s dashboard filter functionality has significantly improved in the past few years. You can now filter all the data in your dashboard at once, even when pulling data from different objects and reports.
This feature is especially useful with date fields because the system allows you to choose which date field the filter applies to, report by report. Pairing this functionality with relative date filters like “This Year” or “Next Month” is especially revealing; one dashboard with the right filters now takes the place of multiple ones.
These filters also work with picklists, so long as the same field exists on every report in the dashboard. For example, you can filter a dashboard about accounts, opportunities and contacts by industry so long as each underlying report can reference the same account "Industry" field.
Producing dynamic dashboards (or not).
By default, a Salesforce dashboard will display values from one user’s point of view, no matter who views it. While Dynamic dashboards make sure that different users see a dashboard differently based on their security access.
You can use this feature to Develop one that shows a single sales rep’s deals, a sales manager all their team's deals, and the sales director everything across the company. You’d need a different standard dashboard for each user to recreate that same functionality!
Salesforce provides you a limited number of dynamic dashboards, so you can’t overuse them. For each one, think about the audience and its functionality: Do I want everyone to see the same thing, or do I want each user to see only their information?
Developing the perfect table.
This feature is especially useful with date fields because the system allows you to choose which date field the filter applies to, report by report. Pairing this functionality with relative date filters like “This Year” or “Next Month” is especially revealing; one dashboard with the right filters now takes the place of multiple ones.
These filters also work with picklists, so long as the same field exists on every report in the dashboard. For example, you can filter a dashboard about accounts, opportunities and contacts by industry so long as each underlying report can reference the same account "Industry" field.
A lightning table of the same data lets you pull in more fields
Both kinds of tables now support conditional highlighting, which adds the same options for custom coloring and thresholds mentioned above.
Reusing the same report multiple times in a single Salesforce dashboard.
Dashboards in Salesforce offer a fantastic breadth of functionality, so it’s critical to manage that breadth by Developing them as efficiently as possible. While every graph, table and metric needs to tie to a source report, it’s often quickest to reference the same one multiple times if you want to see similar data in slightly different ways.
For example, if you’ve created one report that shows open Opportunities, with Amount and Expected Revenue grouped by stage and closed date, you can Develop the following charts and metrics from it:
- A funnel chart of Opportunity amount grouped by stage
- A gauge on total current pipeline amount
- A bar graph of expected revenue by closed date
- A metric component showing total expected revenue in the pipeline
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