Salesforce: Completing The Picture

For a sales rep or a manager to have a complete picture, he needs to see the total value of his closed business together with his open opportunities.  It easily tells him how much he's won, and how much is coming in the future.  The third component of this is of course his target.  These three make it easier for him to manage his business or his team.  In this article, we will focus on presenting "won business" to the sales team.

In Salesforce, if all the opportunities are managed by a sales rep, all of them would be in Salesforce.  So a view into closed business would be as simple as a report of all won opportunities.  As a company grows, this may not always be the case.

There could be incoming business that are sold completely through a different channel, like partners or online direct sales.  There could also be run-rate business, incoming orders that are zero to low touch, recurring or non-recurring orders for spare parts, automatically renewing subscriptions, and similar instances that the sales rep does not actively manage.

And that is where the challenge begins.  How do you complete the picture for your sales team to include this type of business?  There are several options to explore:

The first one is relatively simple in Salesforce, but requires manual entry.  Have some data administrators create won opportunities for the bulk of these no-touch closed business, one for each rep or territory.  If you use Opportunity Products, create one line for each product you report on.  They may also create an open opportunity to show future run rate amount.

The advantage of using Opportunities is that all the existing Opportunity-based reports will work with these records.  The standard Forecast module will also work.  The disadvantage of this particular option is the manual intervention required.  The more sales reps there are, the more opportunities need to be maintained.  The more products you have, the more lines need to be maintained.

The next step to this option is to attempt to automate this via a data feed.  A daily or weekly feed from a data store or directly from your order management application can be used to update these same opportunities.

This gives you the advantages of automation, i.e. not needing admins.  It does require building this automation to transform the data into something that the Opportunity object will accept.

Another option is to use a custom Orders object, or use the new standard Order object that came with the Spring '14 release.  This moves you more into standard Salesforce functionality, but still requires either manual data entry or automated data feeds.  For most companies, the order management application is not Salesforce, so building some form of integration is a must.

The other matter to consider is how much of order details do you really need?  Do you copy each and every order individually and all the line items?  Consider that Salesforce has limits on data storage, which is a function of the number of users in your organization.  Also consider how much reporting are you planning to have in Salesforce?  If you have a product hierarchy, and most reports just filter or group by product family, then you don't need SKU level line items.

So far all of these options involve just Salesforce and some integration.  This is fine if your technology strategy is "Salesforce first".  And for a large part of your sales team, this will suffice.

The final option is of course, one that is more sophisticated.  With all the advantages of Salesforce reports & dashboards, being very easy to create and maintain, Salesforce is still not an analytics platform.  Each company will have to evaluate for themselves whether that simplicity is a priority over capabilities that true analytics and business intelligence solutions provide.

This solution will combine all your data, from campaigns, leads to opportunities, to quotes to orders, even to commissions, into a single data store where everyone can run simple reports to the most sophisticated dashboards that combine all these. There are several choices in this space.  A quick Google search will yield new companies as well as established players.

Having a single solution for both sales, operations and back office may make sense for some organizations.  One requirement though would be seamless integration with Salesforce, both from a data perspective and a user experience perspective.  Sales users should not feel that they are jumping into another application.

The advantage of this option is that you get all the capabilities of a true analytics tool.  The disadvantage of course is the expense of the tool and all the integration work required.

Some companies may be better off with a mix of both: a true business intelligence tool AND reports & dashboards in Salesforce.

In summary, there is no one-size-fits all solution.  Each company must decide and balance their priorities, their capabilities and their budgets, and find one that fits them.