A Salesforce report is basically a gathering of data using metrics and criteria you define within the platform. It is generated by organizing the data in rows and columns.
Salesforce reports can give you valuable insights into the health of a sales team and the sales process. They can even be used as inputs for graphical dashboards.
In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about Salesforce reports: the different types, some essential tips, and how to create a report in Salesforce.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- What Is Salesforce?
- Common Salesforce Report Types
- Tips to consider before building Salesforce reports
- How to Create a Salesforce Report
Let’s begin.
What is salesforce?
Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM platform. This platform is leveraged by sales teams all over the world to:
- Engage and nurture customers with highly relevant and personalized content and customer service
- Improve workflow by automating activities that would otherwise take valuable selling time away from sales reps
Salesforce reports
A report shows a relationship between primary objects and their related objects. The report comes with predefined templates to demonstrate this relationship, which makes reporting much easier. Every report shows only those records which meet the criteria.
- Standard Salesforce Reports
- Salesforce has a “Standard” report style as the default report type. The standard report type is present for all standard objects. Salesforce automatically creates a standard report type for custom objects using “with” or “and” relationship.
- Custom Salesforce Reports
- As the name suggests, this report can be customized as per the user’s needs. The custom report type can be created by choosing the objects of your interest and their relationships. The wizard will give you access to all child objects of these selected objects.
- Custom reports enable strong decision-making and allow businesses to grow and scale in a competitive world.
Salesforce is the most powerful tool that seamlessly unites sales, marketing, customer service, and IT teams. It allows sales managers and leaders to analyze sales data with real-time, up-to-the-minute updates.
Tips to consider before building Salesforce reports
Salesforce makes it so easy that you can build highly detailed reports within minutes. However, creating a compelling dashboard that showcases the optimal data for your organization requires some initial effort.
Below, you will find our top four tips for building reports that show your organization’s progress and provide the insights you require to grow your business even further.
Understand the Types of Salesforce Reports
Salesforce helps you present all types of customer data in various formats. Generally, there are four basic types of reports that you can create in Salesforce.
Having an understanding of these reports will make it easy to choose the most effective layout that presents your information.
- Tabular
- Tabular reports are actually similar to Excel spreadsheets. They use labeled columns and rows to organize, list out the data without subtotals, and provide the most basic view of your overall data. Consider a Tabular Report when you need to create a simple list or put together a list of items with a total. For instance, a sales manager could use a Tabular Report to generate mailing lists of the organization’s open leads.
- Summary
- Summary reports share so many similarities with Tabular reports. However, this report enables you to summarize your data in your desired way, including adding totals and subtotals.
- Organizations commonly leverage this format to display subtotals based on the values of a specific field. For instance, you can use a summary report to showcase opportunities, such as the number of leads that are subtotaled by the salesperson or sales stage.
- Matrix
- Matrix reports list your data and information summaries in a grid-style format. Data can be grouped together and summarized by both row and column.
- Choose this format when there is a large amount of data that needs to be included or when there is a need for comparing values against more than one set of criteria, such as Customer Location or Sales Stage.
- Joined
- This format enables you to merge multiple reports into one. You can utilize this layout to create several blocks that offer different views of your selected data. Moreover, you can customize each block with particular fields and columns and represent data from many report types.
Gradually, you will be using each of these types of Salesforce report to represent your data. They will help you create insightful, practical, and informational dashboards. QuantoKnack offers a certified Salesforce Admin Course that helps you access the Salesforce platform like a pro. Instructor-led, live training sessions will help you get familiarized with real-world scenarios and give wings to your dream career. Register yourself today!
Choose Your Destination
Before you start building the report, you should know what matters for your organization. Every other business has its own set of goals/outcomes – some companies have key metrics that are crucial to them, but that might not be as important to another organization.
It is essential that you discuss with your team and identify what “success” really looks like for your organization or how you define success. As you review, consider the below-listed questions:
- What are our organization’s long-term goals and objectives?
- Identify the particular targets that your organization is striving to accomplish. Some organizations want to acquire more customers within a specific region, while others want to get more value from their existing customers. Talk to your company’s executive members and department heads and determine which metrics are vital to the business’ operations.
- Does the organization have any short-term initiatives?
- For example, your organization runs a new marketing campaign, launches a new product, or tests a unique sales strategy. In that case, you can show the progress of all of these initiatives through your Salesforce reports. Discuss short-term plans with your sales & marketing teams to understand what they are trying to accomplish and identify what metrics they want to monitor to evaluate their success.
- How often do these metrics need to be assessed?
- Determine whether it’s best to assess these metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly, or any particular schedule. Running weekly reports is as simple as quarterly reports, especially as Salesforce can automate and deliver new reports once you have a template in place. Based on your company’s objectives, you may need to run reports more or less frequently.
A driver can never reach his destination if he doesn’t know where he is going. Leverage these questions to decide what metrics are most valuable to the business’s ultimate goal and get the answers to build a strategic road map for your Salesforce reporting success.
Email Dashboards
If you’re a Salesforce Enterprise Edition user, then you can easily automate and send reports to any stakeholder on a pre-determined frequency. Send as an exact clone of your dashboards in Salesforce, as these HTML-enabled email reports can keep your entire team updated about their activities. By using this feature, every stakeholder can stay ahead of the KPIs that matter the most to their department and the overall business growth.
Show Relevant Data
Sometimes you may feel “analysis paralysis” when running Salesforce reports for the first time. It generally happens when you are presented with too much data – causing you to overanalyze and stopping you from making any progress.
Salesforce is full of data, and the more you integrate it with your organization, the more data it will gather. When businesses are not sure about what metrics are crucial, data can be overwhelming and useless.
Salesforce offers countless existing templates that are incredibly beneficial when building new reports. As they are templates, they may contain data not applicable to your business. You can remove any unnecessary data from your dashboard and customize your model to showcase the elements you want to give a glimpse of.
Only include the relevant information to your organization’s goals and objectives; otherwise, viewers might feel overwhelmed with the massive amount of data and miss the crucial information you want them to
notice.
Salesforce provides numerous chart options, including column charts, bar charts, line charts, donut charts, scatter charts, and funnel diagrams. Use them to visualize data and make your information easier to process and understand. Further, create charts so that viewers can digest the info efficiently without digging into the data.
How to Create a Salesforce Report
Creating a report in Salesforce is very easy and depending on your end goals, you can generate detailed reports.
In this section, we will help you learn how to create a simple custom report that can showcase the complete project overview like the project name, its duration, project phases, and the overall health of the project in phase-wise.
Let’s begin.
Step 1: create your report.
Click the “Reports” tab at the top of your org header or search for the “Reports” item in the App Launcher.
There will be two types of New Reports available in the right top corner below the tab header. While creating a new report, you’ll have an option to choose different report types.
Step 2: build out your report
Once you’ve selected your report type, you can now build your report.
On the left sidebar, you will find “Outline,” where you can choose how you’d like to group your data either by rows or columns (if available) and choose what data to display in the “Columns” section.
You can further see all available fields by clicking on the sideways “Fields” to the left of the sidebar and dragging and dropping them into the appropriate sections. After selecting your columns, you can simply drag and drop your fields in the sidebar to rearrange your columns.
If you wish to group by one of the columns, you can drag and drop it under “Group Columns” or “Group Rows.”
Step 3: set your filters
Filter your data by time frame, fields, and record type. You can further apply cross filters to filter across different objects. With all of your business data, you can set filters in the same sidebar under the “Filters” tab.
If you have multiple filters, you can add a filter logic to ensure your data is filtered in a particular order. After running your report, you and your users can adjust the filters by clicking on the filter icon on the report.
Step 4: control how you display your data
You’ll have a few toggles at the bottom of the preview screen that controls how you display your data in your Salesforce report. This can additionally be controlled once you’ve executed and saved your report.
But oh, no! You cannot show all of your data in the report’s main section. Don’t worry. Salesforce shows a limited number of records.
Once you execute your report, you’ll be able to showcase all of your data. To run your report, go to the right-hand corner of the app, and click “Save & Run.”
You will also get the option to give a name to your report and move it to a particular folder in your organization. Click “Save.”
Congratulations! You’ve created a report!
Conclusion
Salesforce is a powerful CRM platform with a comprehensive suite of reporting tools. Once you create the reporting layout that works best for your organization, your future reports can be automated – allowing you to access the data you require quickly, on your specified schedule, and with no additional effort. Follow these four tips to create better reports and keep your team updated on the organization’s progress.
Enroll with QuantoKnack’s certified Salesforce admin course and learn how to create a report in Salesforce like a pro. Get hands-on training from industry professionals with real-world projects and get certified at the end of the course.
Register today!
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