Are you looking for a quick and easy way to increase adoption? Enter Dashboards!
Dashboards are the most visual and fun part of salesforce.com. End users love the way they can see their data immediately represented in colorful and graphical form. They are excited to use the system knowing that their information will change the dashboard’s graphs and metrics in real time for their managers to see.
Dashboards can be a combination carrot and stick approach to user adoption; carrot because they invite users to display their positive results for everyone to see, and stick because if they don’t…everyone will see.
Creating and choosing the appropriate dashboard for your business need is the art and science of an effective dashboard. Thus the first step in creating a dashboard is to find out what information is most important to your business.
Dashboards are great for competitive sales competitions, month over month trends and goal tracking. They can also be an admin’s best friend when it comes to tracking user adoption, data quality and business process adherence. I believe that every salesforce.com instance should download the Adoption Dashboards from the Appexchange.
Steps in creating a good dashboard:
- (Most important) Gather information on what end users/managers want to see
- Ask them exactly how they want to see it (time frames, summarized by what, etc.)
- Create reports of the information and include graphs
- Get approval from end users/managers on reports and graphs
- With approval, create dashboard(s)
- Communicate the new creation of the dashboard(s) to end users. Include purpose of the dashboard(s)
There is high end user/manager involvement in creating dashboards. Do yourself a favor and make sure they are involved in the start of the process. If you don’t, you will waste a lot of time creating beautiful dashboards that no one will use.
Remember, dashboards can be created off of any reports in salesforce.com. So play around with them, find out what works for you, try something new or different and, if you succeed, post it on the Appexchange.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 12, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Matt
One caveat to is that sometimes middle managers do not want upper management to see the sales data until they have had a chance to edit (massage) it to make it not look as bad/good.
With dashboards, everyone sees the same thing. At another company I was at, I had a hard time creating and implementing dashboards for that reason. Middle managers didn’t want vp’s to see the actual real time data, only the data they could feed to them.
September 10, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Dashboards Give Quick and Powerful Insight « The AdminExchange
[...] what is working and make the necessary changes to quickly improve. Dashboards are a great way to drive adoption, especially in top management. You must have the right dashboards if it is going to work [...]
February 7, 2008 at 4:48 am
Ken Knickerbocker
Dashboard’s are wonderful especially if your a senior manager who wants to keep his finger on the pulse of the organization and who is a big picture kind of guy.
I wonder what sales people think of dashboards. Since this is “sales” automation, their input is key. Since I are one I’ll offer my two cents. Dashboards are a “nice to have” but at the end of the day don’t help me all that much. Why? Because I have a dashboard running 7/24 in my head. I can tell you in any given hour on any given day in any given sales cycle where I stand against all the critical points of measurements and which opportunities are likely to close and when and at what price.
Instead I suggest CRM vendors consider giving me something that will make me look more professional, be more persuasive, and speak directly to my customers wants and needs EVERY time I touch them. In short deliver value to me and I’ll use it all day, every day.
June 2, 2008 at 6:20 am
alice
how can we design dashboards?
December 19, 2008 at 10:13 am
Anonymous
“Why? Because I have a dashboard running 7/24 in my head. I can tell you in any given hour on any given day in any given sales cycle where I stand against all the critical points of measurements and which opportunities are likely to close and when and at what price.”
That old chesnut!