5 Must-Have Sales Cloud Dashboards & Reports

Without being able to review Sales Cloud dashboards confidently, any advanced activities you run using AI for support will be kind of pointless when it comes to proving the return on investment. After all, showing ROI to the C-suite is the holy grail of securing future budget.

There’s an old quote I’m fond of:

“A fetish has been made of quantitative methods and whole laboratories have been devoted to solving, with elaborate statistical machinery, problems which had very slight importance.” — Gregory Bateson, 1944

It was written decades before AI came into existence, yet the point of this quote seems more relevant than ever. Are we honing in on AI as a solution for problems that shouldn’t - at least right now - be the focus of our business?

In short, simply being able to report on marketing performance using Sales Cloud dashboards is a foundation every business should have in place and if you’re not yet able to prove marketing attribution, that should be your focus before levelling up with AI.

That being said, here are five Sales Cloud dashboards and reports you must have. 

Essential Sales Cloud dashboards

1. Campaign performance

If your Salesforce instance isn’t set up correctly you can find yourself reporting on what’s easy to measure, rather than what’s complicated to measure but more impactful when presenting to the C-suite. 

An example of this is campaign performance and influence. Marketers work hard to generate demand and deliver leads to the sales team but given Sales are the ones closing the deal, they often get the credit. In Sales Cloud, it’s arguably easier to create a report on Closed-Won per sales rep, than it is to report on marketing campaign attribution across Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud.

If you can’t yet see which of your campaigns are performing best for driving sales, how can you apply your marketing budget to those with the highest ROI? You can’t.

Get a campaign performance report up and running in Sales Cloud to solve that problem.

2. Pipeline

Every business has a unique sales funnel, yet they are all similar in some ways. 

All businesses need to have a visual of what potential revenue is in the pipeline, with accurate confidence levels attached to each stage. 

A pipeline report you’re confident in is crucial to stakeholders because it helps answer questions such as, do you need to hire more people? Or allocate higher budgets to marketing? 

The first step to getting an accurate pipeline report in place is ensuring the qualified lead handover between marketing and sales is defined with scoring and grading, and that each lead is picked up by someone in the sales team with a set process for ‘next steps’.

In terms of creating the report, you’ll need to ensure that your systems are fully integrated too.

3. Lead source

Knowing where your leads originated from is essential for being able to demonstrate marketing attribution and ROI.

Achieving this is completely possible using UTM parameters (aka tracking URLs). Appended to the end of your web page URLs, UTMs can help ensure leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities have an accurate lead source. 

Reporting on lead source opens the door to figuring out how much revenue LinkedIn posts have generated this year, or who your top-performing online referrers are (so they can be rewarded), and which of your Google Ads campaigns generates the most sales. 

If your UTM tracking isn’t fit for purpose and your lead source fields are empty, focus on fixing these issues.

4. Ideal Customer Profile dashboard

You’ve nurtured, sold, and delivered your product or service. Now, you have a record of clients/customers, current or previous, and assuming this data is clean, consistent, relevant, and timely then it can become actionable.

I personally believe everyone should have a dashboard dedicated to customer profiles. 

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) will be different for every company, whether selling products or services, B2B, B2C, low-ticket or high-ticket items, short or long delivery timelines. 

An ICP dashboard will help provide some clarity on three questions:

• Who are your customers?

• Where are your customers?

• What do they want from you?

Of course, knowing the answers to these questions informs your buyer personas, customer journey, and future marketing activities.

Where to start with an ICP dashboard in Sales Cloud? First, determine what’s important in an ICP profile to you. Which data points do you need to see regularly? Then take it from there.

5. Sales history

This might sound kind of obvious but you’d be surprised how many customers don’t have a Sales Cloud report for sales history! 

Historic sales reports show trends year over year, quarter over quarter, and month over month. Tracking sales history means you can reward your sales reps’ performance, but also identify trends in seasonality, promotions, etc.

For example, ice cream sales do well in summer, but a sales history report will help you identify exactly where the dip strikes as the seasons change. In turn, this informs marketing and sales initiatives, whereby you might run additional promotions or increase advertising budgets.

Sales history reports can also alert you to company trends. If your industry is growing but your sales are stagnant over the years, you’re likely losing market share and vice versa. C-suite stakeholders don’t always want to see the nitty gritty, they often want to see top-line numbers; cash flow, and profitability. Sales history can help to provide this.

Dashboard bottlenecks

Perhaps you’re reading this blog post with an air of frustration because you know you need each of these Sales Cloud dashboards but the trouble is, you don’t have the technical know-how, resources, or time to get them setup. I’ll be the first to admit pulling reliable, accurate data points into reports can be a challenge, even when you’re working with Salesforce systems that integrate seamlessly.

At MarCloud, we have a framework called ‘B2BMA Nirvana’, which essentially means we have a process for ensuring that our clients have the foundations in place to create reports and dashboards that show the exact information they need. After years working with Salesforce products, we know exactly what needs to be done and how to do it.

So, if you’re dreaming of the ultimate reporting nirvana and would like an expert team to care of your setup and guide you along the path, request a call. We’d love to chat with you.