Three CRM Reports I Cannot Live Without

sfcg's picture
published by sfcg on May 24, 2011 - 1:37am

When I have the opportunity to work with great people, I end up learning more from them than they do from me.  Having consulted for over 250 different companies in my career, I’ve had the opportunity to witness just about every management style imaginable – some excellent, others not so much.  Each time I work with someone excellent, I try to emulate those characteristics.  It's a hobby of mine to find a common thread amongst all of them.  Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

There is no substitute for organization.

I know that seems funny.  Really?  That’s it?  Honestly, yes.  Just about everything else varies except this constant.

How each great leader stays organized is an entirely different matter.  Using a myriad of tools and techniques they all manage to find a repeatable way to “inspect what they expect.”

So now it’s time for a confession:

I have struggled with organization since the day I opened my doors. Whenever I have mastered it, we have prospered. Whenever it has come unraveled we have had setbacks. Sure there are lots of other factors – the economy, clients, partners, employees and on and on, but the heart of it is – it always could have been better if we’d been more on top of things.  

How about you? Are you the master of organization?  If so, congratulations!   For the rest of us, please let me share how I use our CRM to report on the key things that keep me, my team and my clients organized.  We’ve found that combining a system for sharing knowledge (CRM On Demand) with management practices that demand accountability for the content leads to the organization that allows us to thrive. Best of all, we do it without going crazy!

 

Report #1 – The Fist Bump
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SFCG’s consulting team relies on a great deal of collaboration.  Our engagement model can include a single consultant performing some small engagement right up to a massive engagement that requires the full resources of the firm.  Often consultants (called Ninjas) are working on more than one project at a time.  How do we stay organized and informed from top to bottom?  Every day we have a five minute meetings which we refer to internally as a “Fist Bump”.  It is amazing what can be done in five minutes if everyone knows what is expected of them ahead of time.

At the fist bump everyone has submitted their tasks for the day and we only discuss anomalies. No web meeting, just a conference call. Everyone pulls up their own copy of the report from our CRM On Demand instance.  (CRM On Demand has a real time reporting engine that allows us to build custom reports, which is why we love it.) Simple, quick, real time. It’s so efficient we now do two fist bumps – one in the morning and one in the evening.
Report #2 – What is NOT happening around here?
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Click for full size view		 Any sales person can tell you about their pipeline. Any service person can tell you about the cases they are managing. Marketing can talk about leads. But can any of them talk about what’s NOT happening? That’s a lot harder.  CRM On Demand has a very good answer for that too – the fancy word is called “Negative Cross Object Reporting”.  In plain English it means “Show me the opportunities/cases/leads that do NOT have open activities or plans.”  Such a report allows our managers to focus on the gaps instead of plowing through book reports of the regular day-to-day activities.  
Report #3 – Are we good at predicting the future?
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One of my favorite authors is Nassim Taleb. In several of his books (Such as Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan) he extols the virtues of bottom-up analysis and rails against top-down modeling to make predictions about well . . . anything.  I could go on and on about this topic (and probably will in a future blog) but to keep things short, let's suffice to say that rolling up every single prediction made by everyone in the organization "bottoms-up-style" is the best way to prevent the organization from being blind-sided.  And seeing how our predictions are changing over time is one of the most critical ways to get a feel for our ability to predict the future of our sales.

This report is a bit more complex, but once you understand it, it always tells a story.  This report takes advantage of CRM On Demand's Data Warehouse  (it is one of the only SaaS platforms I know of that offers a free data warehouse!) The report shows our forecast of this year’s sales at different points in time.  For example, the first data point, January of 2010 means “On January 31st of 2010, this was our best prediction of our sales for 2011.  Of course, the number is not very accurate – it’s hard to make a good prediction of consulting engagements (in a bottoms up manner mind you) a year out.  If all our contracts were greater than 12 months, it’s be very easy, but alas, this is the real world.  You can see that as time goes on, our actual and our predicted values begin to converge (or not!).  Anyone who wants to conduct an honest assessment of the predictive value of their forecasts must undertake such an analysis and face the facts.

 

There are a few other reports we use consistently, but they are all variations on these themes.  Being able to quickly obtain real time analysis, report on exceptions (across different record types) and see data warehouse snapshots that trace the evolution of our progress are core capabilities that just did not exist five years ago.  With CRM On Demand, our whole team has been able to access and interpret these reports with great success.  It has also been gratifying to show these kinds of reports to our clients and make sure we use these principles to create reports for them (in their own instances of CRM On Demand) that lead to strategic thought, marketing action and sales results.

- David Ewing

 

David Ewing is the president and CEO of SFCG. He has led the CRM On Demand practice since 2005.