Friday Feature: Salesforce Reports and Dashboards

This post is part of our Friday Feature series where we look at a part of the NewVoiceMedia platform that you might not be familiar with but we think you might find useful!

It’s an age old saying – you can only manage what you measure. For many businesses the reason that the calls coming into and out the company are not managed effectively is because they are not measured in the same way as other business applications.

For a marketing team using applications like Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua every interaction that a prospect has on a blog, or clicking on an email, or attending a webinar is treated like gold dust and adds to the future content targeted at that individual.

For a sales team using applications like Salesforce.com every interaction with a prospect is added to the system, gently moving opportunities forward in the sales process and giving sales people, managers and business execs a common language to understand the state of the pipeline and the forecast for the coming quarter.

But how does the telephone fit into this? How would we answer these questions?

• How long do we spend on the phone in total to close a deal?
• How many calls does it take for a Lead to become an Opportunity?
• Do our best telemarketers take more or less calls to convert to an Opportunity?
• Do our top performing telemarketers make more calls, or fewer calls?
• Do our top performing telemarketers make more outbound calls or just wait for inbound calls?
• Can we learn the likelihood of a deal closing from the length of the first two calls?
• Can we learn the likelihood of a deal closing from the frequency of calls with the prospect?
• Do our top performing Sales people call on specific days or times of the day?
• Can we listen to the calls of opportunities that are forecast this month?

For many businesses these questions would result in a lot of “we don’t know” and “we don’t have any way of finding out this information.”

But if you use ContactWorld for Salesforce then you absolutely can answer these questions.

Every call made through the platform creates a completed task in Salesforce. Firstly this helps salespeople who might be forgetting to record all their activity, but it also adds some custom fields to this task, including:

• the number that was called (inbound and outbound)
• the specific queue that a caller was held in (for inbound calls)
• A unique identifier for the call recording
• The start, end and duration time of the call

With this data now in Salesforce anyone with Salesforce Admin skills can pull together reports and dashboards that present this data in a format that managers and business leaders need.

Reports that you might want to create to add to your Dashboard could include:

• Calls per day by user
• Inbound/Outbound calls per day by user
• Average call length by day and by user

You can then present these reports alongside your lead or opportunity reports and start understanding trends. At NewVoiceMedia we do this for our own use, having a range of Telemarketing and Sales Dashboards where telephony is given just as much prominence as the number of leads or the stage of opportunities.

If you know that your top performers spend twice as long on first calls, or that they use Friday for closing, or that they call in the first two hours of the day, then you can use this information to better manage your team.

We hope this Friday Feature has been of use. If you want more information on how NewVoiceMedia uses Salesforce Reports and Dashboards combined with ContactWorld for Salesforce then just let us know in the comments section below.

For more information on ContactWorld for Salesforce visit click here.