Visualize Data and Engage your Teams with Salesforce Dashboards

Hello! We’re here to share insights on how to keep your team engaged and thriving for success with Salesforce dashboards.

In this last post, we went down through some useful tips on how you could increase your and your team’s productivity using Salesforce reports. If you haven’t had the time to read it, we truly recommend you to. If you have read it, by now, we believe you already have your reports ready to use and abuse. However, powerful reports will be of no use if there is not a place where you can access all the relevant information, quickly spot new trends, and compare metrics across your teams and organization. That’s why we want to introduce you to Salesforce Dashboards and add another string to your bow!

The advantages of using Salesforce Dashboards

A single place to visualize Data

Time is money. Thus, always having to consult data from multiple sources becomes somewhat counterproductive. So, here come the good news: you do not have to worry about that anymore! Salesforce Dashboards let you disclose data to be quickly visualized and interpreted, and allow you to focus on your company results while keeping everyone aware of their targets.

Apart from letting everyone visualize data in one single place, there are other benefits you can take advantage of by adopting the use of Dashboards within your organization. We bet you haven’t even thought about them until now.

Feeling of Ownership

Salesforce Dashboards allow you to keep your employees up to date and mindful about their contribution to company goals. Thus, leading them to put more effort into the job. So, sharing relevant metrics in a way they care about and understand, creates a feeling of ownership that otherwise you would not be able to get.

Increase Transparency

Use Salesforce dashboards to be transparent with your team about the company results and share with them your successes and even failures. This will make them feel like a key part of the process and will be willing to work harder to achieve common goals.  They will certainly respond and act quickly upon any problems. Besides, they will also be able to better align their personal goals with the company goals.

Create your Salesforce Dashboard in 7 steps

Follow these 7 steps to create useful Dashboards and increase user adoption.

1. Choose the Right Components

The components are the visual blocks of your Dashboard. Each component has one source report, so your Dashboard can be composed of components that have different source reports. Let us introduce you the several types of components available:

Charts are used to show data graphically. You can choose from a variety of chart types, depending on the information you want to display.
	Horizontal/Vertical Bar Charts are the best to display status or stage information
	Use Stacked Bar Charts when you have multiple groupings and are interested in the proportions between values in each grouping, as well as each grouping’s total. It’s also possible to stack to 100 percent.
	Line Charts are good to show changes in data over time
	Use a Donut Chart when you have multiple groupings and want to show not only the proportion of a single value for each grouping against the total but also the total amount itself, e.g. the number of leads by lead source
	Use Funnel Charts when you have multiple groupings in an ordered set and want to show proportions among them or you wish to visualize sequential data broken into stages, such as ordered picklists.
	A Scatter Chart shows data grouped by summarized values thus it’s quite useful to visualize the relationship between two groups of data.

Gauge is used to display one single value within a range of custom values, e.g. to show the total current pipeline amount.
Metrics, useful when you have one single key value to display, e.g. to show total expected revenue in the pipeline.
Tables are used to display a set of report data in column forms. They support up to 200 records and 10 columns.

If you have previously added a chart to your source report, you might want to pull those chart settings directly to your component. If this chart suits your needs well, you would be able to cut your work in half and avoid creating one chart from scratch.

2. Create a Big Master Source Report

Try adding multiple charts to your dashboard using the same source report. As you can imagine, this source report must contain a large set of data, as it will be powering all the components of your dashboard. So, do not apply any filters or restrictions directly on the report.

In case you wish to build a master report like this to be reused multiple times, seek to include all the grouping categories you might need to build your component. The good thing is, you can always go back and add additional groupings and fields to your source report.

This way you can have the same set of data displayed in an endless number of ways. When changes are needed, simply change the data in your source report and all dashboard components will be updated.

3. Give Light to your Dashboard

If you go with a Metric, Gauge or Table component, you might also want to apply conditional formatting to automatically highlight some specific metrics and evidence the status of important KPI’s.

Additionally, you can also style your dashboard colors and choose an overall palette to apply the background for each specific component.

4. Build it as a Newspaper

The dashboard must be built so that users can immediately grasp what they are looking for. This way, they can rapidly act upon it. Give them the juicy news and important metrics highlighted in the top of the dashboard and leave less relevant information at a lower level. Do not forget to add a Title, a Header and a Footer to your Dashboard charts to give data a context. And finally, ALWAYS think about your end users when building the dashboard! Do it by including metrics they care about and want to see. In short, try to include things that will make them do their jobs faster.

5. Define whether you will use Dynamic Dashboards

When defining the settings for your Dashboard, one of the things you should do is establish whether you want everyone to see the same data or just their own information. Hereupon, you can choose whether your users will see the Dashboard as:

• ‘Me’ – Everyone will have the same visibility as you;
• ‘Another person’ – Allows people to view the dashboard as whomever you choose. Whenever you specify a single running user of a dashboard, that user determines which data is displayed due to its security settings.
• ‘The dashboard viewer’ – These are called Dynamic Dashboards and it’s the value displayed by default. Everyone will see the information according to their access to data.

Dynamic dashboards also allow the end-user to select other people as viewing user.

So, imagine your team can only see their own leads but you would like them to review all the leads generated by the end of the year. You might consider building a dynamic dashboard, so they can run the dashboard as another user and view all the relevant information. You can also make them view the dashboard as you do, so the next time they consult the dashboard they will see all leads generated in the company instead of just their own.

6. Use Filtered Dashboards

Filtered dashboards are extremely useful when you want to provide different combinations of data to your users because they allow you to filter all data at once, even when you are pulling information from different objects. Apply the filters that are most relevant to the users and let them modify the data displayed right on the Dashboard.

The filters also work with picklist fields if the same fields exist on all your Salesforce Dashboard source reports. Again, consider using a master source report to avoid any confusion.

7. Auto-Refresh the Dashboard

You might be wondering if you can schedule automatic refreshes to your dashboard. As long as you are not using dynamic dashboards, yes, you can! Schedule automatic refreshes in whatever frequency you feel is appropriate. And, don’t forget to add your team members as subscribers so they can receive the Salesforce dashboards you’ve built in their mailboxes! Nevertheless, keep in mind that any filters applied to the dashboard won’t be applied to the emailed dashboard.

Well Done!

Now, are you ready to present your powerful reports and dashboards? Schedule a team meeting or use company events to explain the reason behind your goals and the chosen metrics. Then, just show the results you obtained, so that your team can also be accountable for them.

As the saying goes “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”. As incredible as it might seem, it all boils down to visualizing data.

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