I've put a 'penalty box' on my reps' dynamic dashboard. This section of their dashboard calls out items that they own that require attention. Their penalty box includes issues such as
- open opportunities with a close date in the past
- forecasted opportunities with no quote issued
- open opportunities that include inactive SKUs
- MQLs that haven't been addressed after some period of time
- stale opportunities (untouched in, say, 30 days)
- early-stage opportunities with near-term close dates
These are intended to keep the reps honest and help them keep their pipeline clean.
But I have my own Salesforce hygiene issues to keep up with. So I've created my own dashboard to keep these front and center. I can't necessarily fix all the issues today (who gets those leads when the territory is vacant?), but I want to fix what I can, and then keep sight of others needing attention.
My personal cleanup dashboard includes the following:
- Open opportunities owned by an inactive user.
- When a rep leaves, we'll typically review their open opps. Some may be immediately disqualified (marked closed-lost). Some may get reassigned. But others may sit until we hire a backfill. This dashboard component keeps visibility on those 'in-limbo' deals.
- Products on committed opportunities that haven't been set up in our ERP.
- We have a lot more SKUs in Salesforce than we've pushed over to our ERP. The reps need them in Salesforce to quote (or even to reference prices and descriptions), but we'll only push them to the ERP as needed. This table shows me the SKUs that we're likely to sell soon, so I'll get them set up in the ERP to prepare.
- Closed-won opportunities lacking a NetSuite Sales Order
- When an opportunity is won, we create the order in NetSuite and record it in Salesforce. Opportunities that are won but don't have a sales order number indicate a process failure, and this element calls them out for me.
- Former or new customers
- We change a Status field on the Account record to Customer when we have an active contract. So I have one report showing accounts that have no active contract but are tagged as customers. ('Active' is based on the contract start and end dates on closed-won opportunities.) And a separate report calls out the opposite situation, where there IS an active contract but the account isn't shown as a customer. These are Account attributes that I can correct immediately. I also then track the changes for quarter-end reporting of customers added and lost.
- Leads with improper owners
- We let our marketing automation tool handle most of the lead routing. But sometimes that system doesn't get updated promptly when we have turnover. And sometimes there are other problems such that routing rules don't get applied. So I have a report on my cleanup dashboard to identify leads that are assigned to someone who shouldn't own leads. Usually, I can reassign them (one-by-one, or mass transfers). And then I often go back to address root causes with Marketing.
- New accounts created
- We allow reps to create their own accounts. You know the saying, "Trust but verify."? By listing all the new accounts created in the past week, I get a chance to review them all. Among my checks: ensure it's not a duplicate account; check that the website is accurate; consider whether there's a parent account; confirm the territory and the proper owner. For us, the website is of special interest as that's a key field for our data enrichment tool that brings in info such as industry, revenue, company description, fiscal year end, and number of employees.
For a number of these issues, I had previously created reports and set up subscriptions. Then I'd get an email alert when appropriate. Now I've ditched the emails and put all these alerts in one place. It's a single dashboard, scheduled to refresh every morning.
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