How to build Salesforce dashboards that don’t suck [Interview with Gary Smith]

Gary Smith is the Chief Executive of The Gary Smith Smith Partnership (GSP). Gary writes frequently and expertly on the topic of sales dashboards and sales metrics. We caught up with him recently and asked him to share his secrets to creating sales dashboards that don’t suck. Here’s what he had to say.

Q: Thanks for joining us, Gary. Your company works regularly with clients to develop better dashboards. Can you talk a little more about why that’s so important?

GS: We do the vast majority of our work with existing Salesforce users, and the first thing we ask is to look at their dashboards and their pipeline visibility. Most of the time, they say, “Well, we didn’t get around to creating any decent dashboards.” My answer to that is, “You bought Salesforce to get better sales pipeline visibility. That was your number one reason. If you haven’t created dashboards that will help you manage performance effectively, what did you buy it for?”

The reason this is important is the impact it has on effective sales management, coaching and performance. There’s a wide range of effectiveness among sales managers. But the truth is, they all have decent people skills, and most of them know how to sell. What separates the most effective managers is that they are able to use their people skills sooner because they spot problems earlier, spot underperformers earlier, spot opportunities earlier, and identify high performers earlier.

And the reason they can do this is that they have the right sales metrics and dashboards set up.

Charts and dashboards don’t give you all the answers, but they tell you where to look for the answers. An effective and skillful manager will use them to find the important information quickly. Then they can act on that information.

Another reason reports and dashboards are so important is that ineffective managers spend a vast amount of time gathering data and then arguing the validity of that data. Effective managers have consistent metrics at the organizational level, team level, and person level. They don’t waste time collecting data or arguing about its validity. They spend that time coaching and managing instead.

Q: How can sales leaders know which metrics they should be tracking?

GS: While every organization is different on some levels, the metrics to track are surprisingly similar across industries and organizations. There are up to 12 that everyone should be tracking, and I’ve made it easy to start by collecting those twelve and how to track them into a free ebook available on my website. [Editor’s note: Download the ebook here.]

Q: Are there mistakes that every organization makes when they do create dashboards?

GS: There are three big ones that many companies make.

1. Over-inflation of the pipeline

   This happens when the pipeline contains deals that, with the best will in the world, are unlikely to ever close successfully. It happens because salespeople are under pressure to increase or maintain the size of their pipeline. And of course, most salespeople are optimistic by nature. Removing dormant deals from the pipeline goes against the grain and exacerbates pressure from management on pipeline size. The problem is that it significantly exaggerates the size of the pipeline.

2. Under-inflation of the pipeline

   It’s called sandbagging. It happens when the pipeline is actually much stronger than the sales dashboard would have you believe. Sometimes sales reps leave viable deals out of the pipeline until they’re confident a deal will be done. They keep it off the radar. Avoid management breathing down their neck. At the end of the quarter when everyone’s gnashing their teeth about missed quotas, this salesperson pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Everyone says, ‘He saved our bacon yet again,’ when in fact that deal was going on all the time, just off the radar.

3. Missed forecasts and expectations

   This is the biggest problem. Deals that you thought were going to close this month, suddenly flip to the next month. Often they flip on the last day of the month or quarter. And it happens because you don’t have the right sales metrics in place to assess the quality of deals in the pipeline.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Say your average sales cycle is three months. Suppose we’re in the last week of May and in your sales pipeline you have a deal due to close on May 31. The deal has been open 180 days. The last update was 60 days ago. In each of the last three months it was due to close, and then flipped on the last day of the month to the next month. Should you believe it will close successfully on May 31? Personally I’d be sceptical.

Q: So how do you solve all those problems?

GS: Salesforce customers can take our free app and download and install it. [Editor’s note: You can download that here.] It gives you the physical dashboards and charts you need. The more complex answer is that you need to know how to use them. Then you have to get people to actually use them. And ensure they do it consistently.

Here’s another thing. Salesforce dashboards are too often used as a control mechanism and as a whipping stick. This is why over- and under-inflation occur. Salespeople move deals in and out of the pipeline based on what will relieve pressure from their managers, rather than based on what makes sense. To combat this, you have to instill discipline and rigor across your entire sales organization.

Q: By “instill discipline and rigor,” do you mean implement a formal sales process?

GS: Yes, but I’m not sure I mean it necessarily the way you might think. If you look at a sales opportunity in Salesforce, you’ll find an important field called “Stage”. It represents where you are in the sales cycle. But it’s internally focused on your sales process, not on where the customer is in their buying process.

What often happens is this. The sales rep is under management pressure to close deals quickly. So she all-too-quickly moves the opportunity from the Investigation stage to Proposal Sent stage. Everyone’s happy, we’re proceeding at pace.

In fact, all the evidence shows that taking time on discovery and investigation, getting to the heart of what the customer really needs, actually speeds up the sales cycle and improves conversion rates. So managers need to learn to balance a sense of urgency with checking the deal has been taken through the discovery phase in a disciplined and rigorous manner.

Q: And Salesforce doesn’t have a good way to track that?

GS: No, it doesn’t, but you should expect it to. It’s a system. People that use the system need to think through the process and get common agreement on what each Stage in the pipeline actually means. Then configure the system accordingly. [Editor’s note: Membrain’s Salesforce plugin does an excellent job of solving this problem.]

Q: These are all problems you help clients to solve. Can you give us a real-world example?

GS: Sure. Here’s one. We’re working in a company that has offices in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. The have a marketing team that generates leads, an outbound call team that follows up on those leads to generate appointments, and a sales team to run the appointments. The problem was, they had no agreement on what qualifies as a legitimate opportunity.

So the lead generation team was calling these leads, creating opportunities and then assigning them to a field rep. But there was no agreement on what constitutes a lead or qualified opportunity, or the end to end process for that matter. The field team would look at the opportunity, decide if it looked interesting to them, delete it, and then create a new opportunity if it was something they felt like following up on.

As a result, there was no way to track the effectiveness of the call team, or to link opportunities with the marketing campaigns. It became a conflict situation in which sales blamed lead generation, and lead generation blamed marketing, and marketing blamed lead generation.

We helped them create a more intelligent process using Salesforce and a marketing automation tool. The new process incorporates lead nurturing, better qualification, lead scoring, and clear attributes and characteristics to use in qualifying leads. The result was a 25% increase in the number of sales-ready opportunities and a 15% increase in conversion rate.

Q: Can you tie all of this back to dashboards?

GS: Absolutely. We helped them define the metrics and created the dashboards to give them insight into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and sales performance. They can see how many leads have been created, which campaigns are performing well, how many deals have been qualified, won and lost. This helps them decide where to invest more capital and effort. As you can see it’s been very successful.

Q: Thank you for this insightful conversation, Gary.

GS: Thank you, and thank you for having me.

Are you using sales dashboards in your sales organization? How well are they working for you? Share in the comments or get in touch with us to discuss how Membrain can help solve the pipeline visibility problem (hint: Membrain comes pre-shipped with sales dashboards.)

About Gary Smith

Gary Smith is the Chief Executive of The Gary Smith Smith Partnership (GSP). He is recognized as a thought leader in the use and adoption of CRM systems such as salesforce.com to drive improvement in B2B sales and marketing performance.

Gary and his team have worked with clients in over 30 countries in industries as diverse as media, manufacturing, IT, financial services, construction and sport. He speaks and publishes regularly, not least on the GSP blog.

Gary is a keen skier and cyclist. He is a British Cycling qualified coach and you can find him most Saturday mornings at the Lea Valley Youth Cycling club, teaching kids how to ride a mountain bike quickly and safely.