Tag Archives: Sales
Sales Compensation During Turbulent Times
Sales compensation may not be top of mind during these turbulent times, but it does affect a number of people in the front lines of business, including your sales organization. So leaders do need to pay attention to it.
Sales compensation levers can enable established sales organizations to support and retain sales talent. The most successful compensation levers introduce the ability to adjust the expected outcomes with alternative success criteria.
These can be achieved by:
- Putting in place short-term quota retirement accelerators for scenarios, like a new logo
- Adjusting compensation rules to support compensation payout on booking and invoicing (in addition to customer payments)
- Incentivizing behaviors with spot awards
- Instituting recoverable/non-recoverable draws
- Giving employee retention bonuses for top performers
- Shifting metrics and KPIs to activity-based compensation
- Putting more focus on customer retention and renewals
- Accelerating payout rules to support sales employee retention
- Reviewing and adjusting sales targets
While all of these levers are useful in most scenarios, the sector where the business operates may determine the efficacy of specific options.
A successful sales compensation exception strategy is built on understanding historical data and trends. With ever-changing sales uncertainties, you must build the exceptions into the financial models to arrive at the organization’s financial tolerance. The human element comes in as leadership from operations, sales, finance, and total rewards come together to form a sales incentive task force. The task force needs to study the modified models to identify affected sales individuals and roles.
They then need to determine the most affected sales personnel by taking into consideration other metrics like tenure, level, total target compensation, prior year achievement, and territory composition. This will provide sales leadership with a clearer picture of affected personnel and allow them to be mapped to various available options. Communication from leadership is paramount, as any confusion among the sales ranks on the purpose of this exercise could have unintended impacts.
Make sure to revisit and track these exceptions on a periodic basis to measure them against the allowed financial tolerances and alter them as needed. In this pandemic, when the duration that companies will need to keep these exception rules in play is unknown, you need to develop your best practices for continuous improvement. Any plan should have built-in flexibility to support ad-hoc scenarios by territories and teams.
While these suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive, they should be a good template for organizations of any size to start thinking about how to use sales compensation to retain the best sales talent as they navigate through these difficult times.
COVID-19 has put the entire world in turmoil. Learn more about “Living Through A Crisis.”
Territory Management within Dynamics 365 CRM on Maps – Align territories to balance workload among sales and service reps!
In our previous, blog we have seen how with the help of creating territories sales managers can distribute workload amongst the sales team. With the distribution of work load every sales person has a clear picture of what prospects they need to chase and what strategy they need to follow to generate maximum sales. This also gives the managers a clear picture of how each sales person is performing.
However, in some cases the sales manager might distribute Dynamics 365 CRM leads to the sales persons unevenly due to imbalance in size of territories. Therefore, one sales person might have to chase more leads than other in order to meet their target. This obviously leads to a lag in performance. In this scenario, with the help of Maplytics, territories can be easily balanced in order to provide equal workload to all the reps.
For instance there is a Sales Manager Becca, she has two territories assigned to the sales reps Jacob and Serena. Serena plots the territories on map to visualize how both the territories are distributed. Upon plotting the territories Becca realizes one territory covers greater region than the other.
To avoid the imbalance in the distribution of workload, Becca decides to balance the territory using alignment tool. With the help of alignment tool Becca moves one region from second territory to first.
After moving the geography one Territory 2 to territory 1 now Becca has balanced territories with which workload is distributed between both the territories evenly.
Therefore, you have seen how with the help of Territory Alignment managers can quickly distribute the workload among the reps evenly. Both Sales and Service teams can leverage this feature of Maplytics to balance workload and create motivation amongst team members.
Let’s delve into the benefits of territory management:
- Even work distribution: With the help of territory management teams can distribute the work evenly amongst the team members and weigh their performance. With even work distribution the top performing employees can be sorted out and training program for other reps can be launched.
- Territory Alignment: By aligning territories equal opportunities can be created for all the team members to showcase the best of their performance. They can pursue leads and clients of their territories and make the best of their opportunities.
- Territory Distribution: With territory distribution all the areas, leads and clients in the client/lead base is covered and maximum benefit is acquired from the business.
- High ROI: Since reps are allotted territories evenly, there is a balanced work allotment therefore improving the chance of acquiring clients. Therefore, the overall ROI is high and maximum business is generated.
Thus, you have seen how with the help of territory management you can take your business to another level. In order to acquire maximum leads and clients with the help of Maplytics drop a mail at crm@inogic.com.
To explore the solution for a free trial of 15 days download the app from our or
Happy Mapping!
Beyond Sales Proposal Templates: Create Dynamic Sales Proposals in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales
The last time you sent a proposal to a prospective customer, did the scene play out like this?
You spent 20 minutes finding the right sales proposal template, or worse, copying a previous proposal. Then you spent another 30 minutes personalizing it and double-checking that every blank is filled in and mention of other customers is replaced with your new customer. Then you copied and pasted your price quote (which you also spent 2 hours putting together manually). Before you sent the proposal, you spent another 20 minutes finding the right assets and attaching several supporting documents to the email, hoping the buyer would open the files and read them.
Whew! That’s a lot of work. And after all that effort, you’re still left wondering, “Did they read my email? Did the slick sheet I attached speak to their needs? Did they share the email with internal stakeholders?”
A sales proposal has a lot riding on it. And, a couple of missteps can derail a deal.
Those mistakes could be anything from overlooking a personalization field in the template, to errors in the price quote, to attaching the wrong assets.
One of the biggest missed opportunities is to a buyer’s request for a proposal. 50 to 78% of B2B customers buy from the first vendor to respond. And, in our scenario above, it could take a few hours to pull together a quote and generate a proposal. Who has that much time to waste? And, why should your buyer have to wait that long?
If it takes too long to generate a proposal, they will move on to another vendor.
Beyond Sales Proposal Templates
Templates are a good thing. They save time and standardize corporate communications. However, sales proposal templates have their limitations. They are a good starting point when creating a standard branded template. But when they have to be manually personalized they are vulnerable to errors.
You may be thinking, “I use mail merge to pull information from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to fill in the blanks of my template.” That is more efficient, but ultimately not as effective as it could be. These types of proposals often read as cookie-cutter (because that’s what they are). Your clients deserve a better, personalized experience.
The Better Alternative: Digital Sales Proposals
A better way to share proposals with your buyers is to generate a dynamic digital sales proposal that is personalized for each client. A digital sales proposal, or , is a micro-website that delivers personalized content customers need to make buying decisions. All the pertinent information, such as case studies, ROI calculator, and customer reviews, are located in one place that is easy to share with internal stakeholders, instead of multiple email attachments.
DealRoom sales proposal software technology integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, enabling sales teams to generate customized business proposals that help close deals quickly. It’s a smart way to extend the value of your investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Not only do buyers benefit from a personalized experience, sales teams benefit as well. Using dynamic sales proposal software, they can easily collaborate on deals. And, deep sales insights on customer engagement and level of interest are collected from every DealRoom. This collective data set helps sales operations determine friction points and optimize sales content.
It’s time to go beyond sales proposal templates, and provide your customers and sales team with an optimal buying and selling experience. Learn more about DealHub’s expertise in the sales proposal software category and see a customized DealRoom. .
Article by: Gideon Thomas – VP Marketing & Growth, DealHub.io |
DealHub Configure-Price-Quote solution is rated the #1 CPQ software for ease of use, easiest setup, and best support. Sales teams configure quotes and proposals faster with fewer errors. DealHub’s highly intuitive CPQ minimizes administrative tasks, empowers sales teams to engage more effectively with buyers, and streamlines sales operations to reduce the sales cycle and increase revenue. It operates natively within Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales and includes: dynamic sales playbooks, interactive content sharing, document generation, contract management, and e-signature. to learn how DealHub will accelerate your sales process and help your team close deals faster.
A few problems in B2B sales that D365 + CPQ can fix
It happens to every B2B sales organization: flatlining. Not as in “dead,” but as in hitting a plateau, an even line, maintaining. And while holding steady doesn’t sound too bad for most things in life, in B2B sales, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
Let’s take a look at a few problems fueling flatlining in B2B sales, and how you can leverage Dynamics 365 Sales and its extensions to fix them.
Unlike in the B2C world where a buying decision is often made in a moment, B2B buying cycles tend to be loooooooong.
If you’re a Dynamics Partner, this ain’t news: no one buys D365 Finance in a week: it’s six months minimum. CRM sales have a shorter sales cycle (sometimes as little as 30 days), but that still, like most B2B sales, dwarfs the time your average B2C sale takes.
Fortunately, with the ability to track every interaction, set every meeting and reminder, and store every document, Dynamics is built for the long haul.
Not only that, but by connecting your entire Microsoft ecosystem (Finance, D365 Sales, Outlook, LinkedIn, and more), the long haul may even be preferable as the data you collect therein can give you a far more complete profile of your prospects and customers.
So let’s rephrase: Dynamics isn’t just built FOR the long-haul: it’s built to THRIVE in the long-haul.
Quality leads are the name of the game, but $ #!~ leads are usually what’s at the top of your funnel.
How do you tell your good leads from your bad leads? You don’t. Let your leads tell YOU. Dynamics 365 Marketing, for example, has dozens of tools that help you automate the qualifying process.
Rather than wasting valuable human resources on qualifying every lead you acquire, use what’s built in to Dynamics to automate that task: capture website visits, email opens, social media activity, and other critical engagement metrics to score leads, and let Dynamics automatically route leads to a rep when the score is right.
Setting a “win win” price has always been a challenge: most B2B reps would love to start a pricing conversation by simply asking a prospect, “Whaddya got?” But most prospects would then reply, “Nada.”
So what’s your starting point for the pricing conversation? Dynamics can help. And it can help even more when you extend it with a configure, price, quote () solution.
How Dynamics helps uncover the right price
When you’re using D365 Customer Insight as part of your solution, you’re able to merge all data form every interaction to enjoy a 360 degree view of your customers and get insights into their buying behavior. Couple that with contextual AI from D365 Sales, and Competitor Entity in CE, and you can quickly get a better idea of what price is right for the market overall and the prospect in particular.
How CPQ helps deliver the right price
CPQ (such as our solution, iQuoteXpress, which has a ) has at its heart a dynamic product and pricing configuration engine that enables a sales leader to centralize and optimize product configurations and pricing.
With CPQ as part of Dynamics, you can rest assured that the latest product configurations (and their upsells, cross-sells, and upgrade paths) as well as the pricing attached has been proven-out by other sales reps in your enterprise.
With CPQ, every rep is working off the same script at the most important part of the B2B sales cycle — the proposal.
And while we started this article talking about “a few things” you can fix to improve sales, if you ONLY fix how pricing is configured in your sales quotes, you’re on a path to grow with every quote you send.
4 Sales Presentation Innovations That Keep Viewers on the Edge of Their Seats
People have been giving presentations for thousands of years, from Moses with his stone tablets to Elon Musk revealing his grand plans to colonize Mars. While the elements of a great pitchman generally have remained the same over the past 5,000 years — conviction, charisma, credibility — today’s successful presenters do more than just get in front of an audience and talk. They meld together technology, data and multimedia to hammer home key talking points that keep viewers engaged throughout.
So how do you project the power of Moses in your next presentation? Those of us operating without divine intervention typically rely on PowerPoint as our stone tablets. PowerPoint has been around for more than 30 years and has changed not only the way we present, but also how we write and communicate.
PowerPoint allows anyone to create a professional presentation with relatively little prep time. As a result, it has proliferated and become the business norm. The pitfall is that too many of us rely on our slide decks to do too much, to the point that it overshadows the presenter and dominates the meeting.
For a really engaging, productive presentation remember that your slides are there to support you, not the other way around. Utilize the following tips to build a supplemental deck and presentation management strategy that will support your voice, reinforce your thoughts, and keep your audience on the edge of their seats.
1. Start With the Story
Tell a story, don’t sell a product. Sixty percent of people find generic sales pitches
to be irritating, according to Hubspot. Only 5 percent of attendees remember individual statistics, but 63 percent can recall stories.
We remember stories because they are about us — human beings with hardships, happiness and feelings. Speakers who connect with us in that way have a better opportunity to fully engage us.
That may sound challenging in a business environment where your material is very cerebral, like financial forecasts or charts conveying clinical data, but in those cases you can translate that data into its human consequences. Financial forecasts? Yay! You’re going to be rich (or going broke). Clinical data? You’re cured from that horrible disease. Life is good.
Money and health are two things we all feel with our hearts. When you are selling a consulting service, it’s great to talk about the experience your experts have, but remember to include how you can help your customer — make their jobs, their lives, whatever, better and easier.
2. Lead With Your Eyes and Body
Without even realizing it, we say more with our bodies than with our voices. How we stand — strong and upright projecting confidence, or slumped and hunched over projecting defeat — will do more to convince an audience than any of the words that come out of our mouths.
How we express ourselves, with eye contact and animation, also creates a bond. Former President Ronald Reagan was an expert at this. He rarely gestured with his arms. Rather, he used his eyes and his facial expression to talk with the American people.
Look your audience in the eye. If you are presenting to one or two people, that’s easy. If you are presenting to a large group, go across the room, one-by-one, pick a person and make eye contact for five seconds. (When you’re speaking, five seconds seems like an eternity. It’s hard, but not impossible.)
You probably won’t get to everyone in the room, but that’s not the goal. By keeping eye contact and making that connection, you become more relaxed and conversational. You will converse with individuals rather than orate at an anonymous audience. Sales success is as much about creating and maintaining relationships as it is about the products we sell.
What about Web meetings? Today, we are all logging in through our screens, whether phone or computer. Making eye contact and using body language might sound antiquated. It’s not. Do it anyway. Turn on your video camera, and even if it’s just a call in, remember that our voice, our tone, and our body language contribute to our overall manner and influence how people respond to us. Even if your audience can’t see you, a confident, yet relaxed manner will still have a positive effect.
3. Follow the Conversation
PowerPoint’s linear format has forced us into a rigid outline for presentations to keep everything in a strict order. The problem is that we don’t think in a linear order. The human mind likes to wander. Our audience’s mind is wandering as we’re speaking. So forcing them into a strict, linear outline with bullet points will bore them.
Diversions or questions at the wrong time can throw off a presenter’s game. Instead, presenters should get out of linear mode, go interactive, and let the presentation follow the conversation. Break up the slides with questions to the audience. Engage them, make direct eye contact, and ask a simple question, “Does this make sense so far?” or “Are you all following me?” or “What do you think?”
In doing so, you are turning your presentation into a conversation. You are breaking up the corporate monotony associated with PowerPoint. Above all, you are bringing your audience into your presentation so they become a vital part of the broader discussion. As a result, they are more invested in you and your message. Your message transforms and becomes their message. They sell themselves.
4. Use Analytics to Determine Messaging
Until now, we’ve talked about style, but substance matters too. Large organizations invest millions to create the right message, with the right graphics and brand. Despite that expenditure, 70 percent of content never gets used, and 90 percent never gets reused — a wasted investment. Why? Usually it’s only because your sales rep can’t find the slide or content needed while preparing the deck. Give your sales team substance.
Give them the content that helps them sell. Reporting and analytics can tell you what’s resonating in the field with customers and what’s not, so you can create more, better content going forward and retire content that’s not working.
If Bob just closed a major deal using his deck, see what elements he included and then make them standard in the decks of your other salespeople. Real-time data helps guide the type of content you should be creating for your salespeople to perform optimally, while helping you get rid of bad and unused content that’s just a cluttery distraction.
You don’t need divine intervention to be an effective presenter. You just need your company’s best content combined with your best self. This presentation management strategy allows your salespeople to worry less about slides, focus on their customers, and make a human connection that builds trust. You don’t need to be Moses to sell. You just need to be yourself.
AlexAnndra Ontra is cofounder and president of
Shufflrr, and author of
Presentation Management: The New Strategy for Enterprise Content
Tips to Help You Optimize Your Sales Funnel
All businesses want to be profitable and see their numbers grow from year to year. To experience sustainable growth, however, businesses have to fine tune and streamline their sales processes to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers faster than before.
Doing so can be difficult because of everything involved in getting prospects to the finish line. For businesses dealing with disconnected systems and inefficient processes, it can be hard to gauge where things went wrong, how to reel leads back in, and also ensure a seamless handoff when prospects are ready to talk to Sales or make a purchase. Many times, these organizations find themselves constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on driving growth.
Thankfully, with the right strategy, businesses can attract the right leads, provide them with personalized experiences that improve engagement, and ensure they have everything they need to make an informed decision when they near the end of the sales funnel.
So, if driving conversions and improving ROI are two of your business goals for 2020, you’ve come to the right place.
The following tips will help you engage your leads, keep them moving through the sale funnel, and win them over when the time to make a purchase comes around.
Use Segmentation to Personalize Your Marketing Efforts
Thanks to Google and social media, today’s customers are accustomed to accessing the information they need in just a few clicks. This puts the pressure on you and your team to deliver targeted information and experiences.
To meet this demand, companies are replacing their one-size-fits all marketing with more tailored and targeted messaging and experiences.
Unfortunately, this has proven to be a very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming feat for many organizations. Not only are they trying to expand the number of campaigns they produce, but they’re also determining the most effective method to distribute their efforts to the right audience at the best time.
Where does “digital transformation” meet your customers? Usually in your sales quotes.
It’s no secret: Microsoft is keen on digital transformation, “reimagining how you bring together people, data, and processes.”
And while many companies are implementing best practices in Microsoft digital transformation (we’ll call it MDT for short, here), just as many customers of those companies are greeting MDT with a collective shrug, saying, “Well, that’s great for you: what’s in it for me?”
They’re right. Because while we focus on MDT for ourselves or for companies we’re equipping with D365 CE, Azure, and Office, the people on the other end — the customers of OUR customers — don’t typically realize the benefits of MDT (or, more often, don’t realize that they’re realizing the benefits of MDT).
But when you put a quote in their hands — a professionally designed, vertically-targeted sales proposal with optimized product and pricing configurations — you are, in effect, also delivering the benefits of MDT to them as well.
If you’re serious about digital transformation as a cornerstone to driving more revenue and optimizing your overall business, then the way you put a quote into their hands is by extending Dynamics with a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution.
D365 + CPQ = connecting people, data, and processes
The point of MDT is to connect all three — people, data, and process — through your tech. But let’s talk about simply connecting people, first.
Connecting people
When you digitally transform your proposal process by (whether it’s CRM or ERP), you empower your own salespeople to create more effective, more professional sales proposals in about .
Where does this part of MDT reach your customers? In both the process and content of the RFP response they receive from you.
Process-wise, you’ll be able to send a proposal more quickly and cleanly to each prospect, and also be able to more quickly and completely follow-up on each step of the process.
An MDT approach can help transform the content of your proposals as well via a that ensures only optimal pricing and product selections or bundles are presented to your prospect.
As CPQ is a centralized solution, the improvements it delivers are enterprise-wide. No matter what rep might be sending a quote, you’ll know that the look and feel are professional, that the pricing is optimal, and that it made it into the right hands at the right time.
Connecting data (and processes)
helps you collect critical sales proposal data that you might not otherwise be able to capture. And that data can have an immediate impact on process improvements that drive more business.
First the data piece: while most CRM systems, for example, offer metrics around quotes sent and quotes closed, there are many other “moving parts” in the process that should be noted: replies, revisions, etc. When you apply MDT to your sales quoting process, you create the opportunity to uncover new data streams that can give you actionable insights to impact your bottom line.
Sticking with CRM as an example, when you connect this data to the rest of your sales funnel data, you get a clearer picture of what might be the most critical juncture in the process of turning a prospect into a customer: the timeframe when they move from receiving a quote to signing it.
MDT and ROI
When you digitally transform your sales quoting process by adding CPQ to Dynamics, you quickly empower your people and can uncover more data to fuel better processes. And as you’re applying MDT to the closing process, there may be no faster way to realize ROI on digital transformation.
Learn how digitally transformed its sales proposal process and saw quotes times reduce by 50%, errors reduced by 50%, and sales rep onboarding time reduced by more than 90%.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales now offered by iCepts
Microsoft CRM, now called , is now offered through iCepts Technology, Inc!
Since 1980, we have been providing business management and supply chain technology systems to small through mid-sized organizations. In addition to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems from Microsoft, called , we have, over time, complimented our product offerings with additional inventory management and business applications such as , and solutions. We want to be your “one stop shop” for all of your technology system’s needs.
Now with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM), our clients can access a robust application to effectively manage their customers and prospects with a tight integration to other Microsoft systems that we specialize in such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Office. You can have both Microsoft ERP and CRM in one place!
Dynamics 365 for Sales can help organizations stay on track of opportunities, timely follow up on actives and close sales faster through a broad range of advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality such as:
- Lead Management
- Goal Management
- Opportunity Management
- Real Time Reporting and Insights
- Sales Process Management
- Account/Territory Management
Learn more about
Posted by iCepts Technology Group, Inc. A.
Take a Tour of the New Sales & Returns Sample Report
We’re excited to introduce a new Power BI sample report for you to play around with. This report includes new features, shows designs factors you should take into consideration when building a report, and has been optimized Power BI Desktop, service, and mobile. You can see how visuals from AppSource can be added to your reports, how they work well with other Power BI visuals, and learn how the Power Apps visual can be used in a report.
Click on the image below to explore the sample in the Community Data Stories Gallery, or Download the PBIX to follow along.
This report shows many powerful features of Power BI in the context of a sales and returns data story. The scenario this report is set in is a company that sells Microsoft themed skateboards and wants to quickly see the state of their sales and returns and analyze how they should modify their operations.
We want to extend a huge thank you to Miguel Myers and Chris Hamill who created this report! Miguel and Chris are members of our team who are truly gifted in bringing together data and design. If you want to follow some of Miguel’s best practices for report design, you can check out his YouTube channel. You can also follow Chris’ blog for Power BI creators, Alluring Analytics, or follow him at his Twitter.
The Sales & Returns report has been structured to have five main pages: Intro, Net Sales, Returns, Return Rate, Market Basket Analysis. In the following sections, we’ll go into the purpose of each of these pages and features to play around with.
The remaining pages in the report are hidden because they have been used to construct tooltips and other parts of the five main pages.
To get the full experience of the sample report in Power BI Desktop, please make sure to turn on your preview features in the report options dialog.
The intro page gives a description of the data story and lets people who are viewing the report know that the report is interactive. If you’re viewing the report in the Power BI service, you can even press the ‘Download PBIX’ button to get the PBIX file and play around with it in Power BI Desktop.
On the right side of this intro page, a gif shows interactive capabilities of the report. Throughout this report, you can go to the visual header tooltip icon (“?”) to see an animated tooltip that shows you different interactive elements within a visual.
If you press on the first small dot in the string of connected dots, the right side of the Intro page will show all the design factors that were taken into consideration when the report was made.
Audience is the intended report consumers. Platform is all the Power BI platforms that this report can be viewed on. UI/UX are the design considerations that the report author considered when building this report. Analysis are the features and capabilities the author included to let report consumers explore more about the data and act on the insights they’ve discovered.
The Net Sales page is the first of two pages in the report that give the state of the business. At the top, two cards are being used to call out the most important KPI’s, which in this case is Net Sales and Units Sold.
Below the KPI’s, are three visuals: Category Breakdown, Store Breakdown, and a Q&A visual.
Category Breakdown shows the net sales of Microsoft themed skateboards, and the visual to the right of it shows net sales by store. When you hover over a data bar in Category Breakdown, a report page tooltip will show up and provide more information about that particular product.
The Category Breakdown and Store Breakdown visuals have buttons at the bottom where you can toggle between the visual and an alternate view. (In Category Breakdown, you can see a tabular view. In Store Breakdown, a map.) These alternate views have been created using bookmarks.
The map visual in this report is the Mapbox custom visual from AppSource. Visuals from AppSource work well with core Power BI visuals. You can still click on them and they will interact with other visuals to relevant cross highlighting or filtering.
The Q&A visual lets you dig deeper to find additional details in the data. It’s a useful tool for report authors to build reports and for report consumers to explore the data. You can follow this link to learn more about how to use the Q&A visual.
At the top of the page, you’ll also see a button that says Key Influencers
Clicking on it will open a view of the Key Influencers visual. In the context of this report, you can use it to analyze the demographics of customers.
There is also a button to see a Decomposition Tree visual.
You can use the Decomposition Tree to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric. The Decomposition Tree is currently in preview, so if you are viewing this report in Power BI Desktop, please turn on the Decomposition Tree preview feature.
The returns page is set up to have the same structure as the Net Sales page, but with information about returns. You can take the same actions displayed in the Net Sales page and explore the state of Returns.
The Net Sales and Returns pages were also designed for a mobile experience. When you create reports for executives or people who are always on the go, it’s important to think about how you can also optimize your report for mobile. To create a mobile view, go to the View tab in the ribbon, and press Phone layout.
As stated previously, this report can be used to find out the current state of the business and used for analysis to help you take action.
Insights
Starting from the Net Sales page, you can right-click on a data bar to find different insights.
Once you select “Find where this distribution is different”, another window will open as an analysis is being run on your data. This window lets you scroll to explore possible explanations for where the distribution is different, and the visuals in the window are interactive. You can click on data points in the suggested visuals and slice the data by pressing segment buttons.
Drill Through
Another way you can incorporate analysis into your report is to use drill through. Staying on the Net Sales page, if you right click on a data bar, you will see the option to Drill through to two other pages that have been set up for this report: Return Rate and Market Basket Analysis.
Note: In this report, you can also go to the Returns page, right-click on a data bar in “Category Breakdown” and see your drill through options.
Let’s say you want to learn more about XBOX skateboard sales. Once you drill through to the Market Basket Analysis page, on the left, you can learn more about how the XBOX skateboard is performing. On the right is a custom visual cluster map.
The cluster map shows that customers who buy XBOX skateboards are likely to buy XBOX One skateboards as well. Because this report was created for multiple audiences, someone who is in an operations role could even prepare for an influx in sales of a product by pressing “Open Power App” and ordering more skateboards.
Because Power Apps visuals can only be viewed by those who are in the same organization as you, when you press “Open Power App” we’ve embedded a video that shows an example of a Power App you could embed for your own organization.
This is just one of the ways you can use a Power App visual into your Power BI reports to bridge the gap between workflows in your organization. This report empowers its report viewers to take action based on the data in their organization.
“What if”
Going back to the drill through options, you may have noticed that there was another drill through called “Return Rate”. If you right-click and drill through on the OneNote data bar, you are taken to a page that gives information about the returns of the OneNote skateboard.
The visual on the left tell says that the return rate of OneNote skateboards is 55%. The main two other visuals on the page show “What if” analysis. You can change the slicer towards the top of the page and ask, “What if the return rate changes?”
Changing the return rate in the slicer will change the forecast numbers that are projected and the associated visuals.
With “What if”, this skateboard company can learn how their profits can be affected. The “What If” Analysis Forecast visual can also help the skateboard company decide to order more OneNote skateboards in February but decrease their stock of OneNote skateboards in April. Toggling this visual to Extra Profit shows a stacked column chart that displays how much more the company can make by decreasing their return rate.
The large amount of purple in January shows that the company should increase their focus on reducing returns of OneNote skateboards in January and that June may not be impacted by returns of OneNote skateboards very much.
We hope this helps you play around with Power BI and gives you some ideas as to how you can build rich experiences in your reports. As more features are added to Power BI, our hope is to roll out more sample reports so you can see how new features can be used in context. We’ll have sample reports that are designed for accessible experiences, so stay tuned.
How To Be A Good Sales Ops Person
Albert Einstein said: “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.” In most organizations, the sales operations job description is vast and diverse, and it’s sometimes a challenge to pinpoint what it takes to become good at sales ops.
One thing is for sure: sales ops should be multi-dimensional, which is not easy because humans can only operate in fixed or known dimensions, as the human brain, as complex as it is, has finite dimensions. Therefore, rather than wasting your time, energy, and effort trying to achieve the impossible or fantasizing about becoming a superhero, focus on the following five most important and pragmatic characteristics that will help you transform into a good sales ops person.
1. Strengthen your technical sales knowledge and skills
You must have a good understanding of the tools, applications, and analytics platforms that you will use to do your job. This knowledge comes through continuous learning and experimenting. You must also have good analytical and statistical skills to quickly understand and explain your analysis.
You should also have a good awareness of the technical terms that are part of every sales conversation, like RoI, BoM, PoC, segmentation, customer classifications, etc. Knowing these technical sales terms helps you collaborate with the sales team.
2. Be creative and improvise
There is no single tool or report that will fulfill your sales team’s complete needs. Always think about improvements that will make things simpler and more relevant. Try to put yourself in others’ shoes and think about what they need to make decisions quickly and accurately. Be ready to act quickly and deliver content with the data, reports, and tools at your disposal.
3. Stay close to the people and business
Don’t confine yourself to your analysis and spreadsheets. Be ready to wear other hats to add value to the business. There could be times when the sales team needs your support with their business, and you should not pull back because it’s not part of your written roles and responsibilities. Instead, seize the opportunity to strengthen your relationship with the team; sales team members are more responsive to sales ops they can trust and rely on. Sometimes just bringing hot coffee to a meeting can make a big difference.
4. Improve your organizational and interpersonal skills
Because sales operations is often a team sport that works across different departments (e.g., sales, finance, controlling, commercial, legal, IT, business applications, etc.), you need to be a strong influencer. Having good communication with others in sales and other departments plays a critical role in your job success.
5. Get the right attitude and mindset
A great sales ops person naturally has a personality that makes them a good fit for the job, such as an affinity for data, business acumen, results orientation, flexible tenacity, problem solving, and diagnostic thinking.
It’s important to know that a good sales ops person must have all the above characteristics; having just one or two will hold you back. Some people are technical geniuses but may not be good at getting along with others; others may be really good at the interpersonal stuff but need help putting together a basic spreadsheet.
In general, to be a good sales ops person, you should be willing to do what other sales ops people are not willing to do. Instead of wishing for things to be easier, work to become better yourself. Try to be well-rounded, someone who is good at all these things and not just great in one. In other words, work to become a jack of all trades, not a master of one.
Your organization’s culture influences its success. Learn about “Understanding Organizational Cultures.”