5 Quick Salesforce.com User Adoption Reports You Can Start Today

If you are a sales manager and you have a customer relationship management (CRM) software you may struggle with getting your sales team to actually input the data on a daily basis. Heck, you may struggle with getting them to enter data on even a weekly or monthly basis. Oftentimes, when we get into a Salesforce CRM project, we start defining a user adoption strategy right away. It doesn’t matter what CRM application you have, if you don’t have a user adoption strategy then you are only getting a portion of the quality data you need.

Here are five simple, yet effective, reports and metrics you can implement today to evaluate user adoption and ultimately the quality of the data in Salesforce.com.

1. New Opportunities Added This Week/Month
Whether your sales meetings are weekly or monthly make sure there is a report that lists the new opportunities added this period. Not only do sales managers want to see the amount of revenue closed each period but they also want to see new opportunities added. But unfortunately, if not held accountable, sales people won’t enter the opportunity into Salesforce CRM until it’s far down the sales funnel. With a report that lists each opportunity added within the period sales managers are now able to view the top of the funnel and thus monitor it as it flows down the sales funnel.

2. Opportunities Set to Close this Week
By creating a report detailing the opportunities that are set to close this week will make sure that sales reps are updating the close date of their opportunity. This also helps sales managers create better sales forecasts and projections.

3. Opportunities Past Due
If this report shows zero results then things are good. If this report shows a large amount of results then you have one of two problems. Either your sales people can’t keep up with the opportunities in the pipeline or they are not updating the opportunities at all. We typically see it’s the later because sales people wouldn’t allow for a qualified opportunity to pass them buy. By creating a report of opportunities that are past due sales managers are now able to review each of the results and hold their sales reps accountable to keeping the data up to date and clean.

4. New Accounts and Contacts Added this Week
In order for a sales person to create an opportunity there has to be a person to sell too. If sales people aren’t held accountable to interacting with people they surely won’t have a very good pipeline. By measuring the new accounts and contacts added each period sales managers are able to ensure their sales people are out there doing their job and “pounding the pavement”. If this report is empty then the pipeline will get empty very soon.

5. Activity Report
Sales is a numbers game. You need to make phone calls, emails, meetings, presentations, demos, network and the list goes on and on. All too often, sales managers just assume their sales reps are doing those things. But if they aren’t hitting their revenue numbers then there is an issue with their activity. But if a sales manager can’t see the sales reps activity then it’s difficult to pinpoint the issues. By holding sales reps accountable to certain activity metrics will ensure they are inputting all their activity into Salesforce. We always recommend the points system which creates accountability to activity performed each week with internal competition.

There are many more reports and metrics your company could use but these five seem to make the quickest impact to any sales organization. Make sure you add these to their own dashboard too. Now, you are able to refer to one dashboard that will list the reports and data you want to see to ensure user adoption is successful.

Does your company use any other metrics beyond these five? I’m sure it does and I hope you feel compelled to share your unique report.