Why are Goals useful in CRM?
In a business, goals are a measurable way to test performance for an organization. CRM has adopted this philosophy and has a tool called Goals to allow you to track measurable results inside of CRM. For sales, that generally means tracking the number of opportunities or tracking the value of closed deals. Goals are especially useful, as individual goals can be added up into a team goal, and added up again into an organizational goal. That way, a sales manager can see how an organization is doing and see who is best contributing to the bottom line. Today we will build a Goal for a salesperson.
In CRM, Goals are made up of Goal Metrics. Goal Metrics define what it is we are going to measure. Items such as money or account of something are how we measure that item in the Goal Metric. For this example, our Goal Metric will be a money amount. Now we need to define a Rollup field. A Rollup field is the specific field CRM looks at to create the value for the Goal Metric. For this example, we will look at an opportunity’s actual revenue for won items.
We will also define the goal period that this tracks based on actual close date. What this means in real terms is that we want to see how much money we have brought in during a single reporting period. Once we’ve saved the Rollup field, we can now save the Goal Metric or we could add another field to track. For example, you can also track open opportunities and their estimated revenue as the in progress side of a Goal. We, however, are going to continue making a Goal.
Once we’ve saved our Goal Metric, we want to create a new Goal, assign the correct Goal Metric to it, and then assign who is responsible for the Goal (Goal Owner). From there, two of the things we need to fill out are the time period if it is not the current fiscal period and the target, which is how much money we want them to make. If we needed this individual goal to roll up into a larger organizational goal, we can also set a parent goal that will actually accept the information from the child goals.
Now that we have created the basics for the goals, save the Goal, and if you want to see the results immediately, hit “recalculate” in the ribbon. This will immediately tell the goal to grab the data it needs from CRM. Otherwise, Goals will recalculate nightly. The best way to track Goals is through the CRM Dashboard. Goals have a special graph that will give you actuals, today’s target, the fiscal period target, and in progress if you track it. The sales Dashboard built in to CRM already has a goal tracking section. So the moment you make a salesperson's goals, he or she will see it and be able to work towards it. The sales performance Dashboard for the managers will have Rollup Goals if you have made them. And as discussed last month, you can always make your own custom Dashboard with as many goals as you desire.
by Arke Systems
