Launchpad Lesson 20 - Reports

Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to show you how to create your own Salesforce report.

This is another one of my favorite topics in all of Salesforce because once your team sees the power of Salesforce reports, they'll be hooked. Leaders tend to get very enthusiastic about the data they can see from reports. And when your leaders are excited, they're more likely to push their teams to use Salesforce properly.

There are four types of reports you can create: tabular, summary, matrix, and joined. We're going to build a summary report in this demo.

Reports offer considerably more options than a list view, including sharing via folders, grouping data, adding up column totals, scheduling, and exporting to Excel. List views do allow you to do something very valuable called inline editing, and they're a little easier to read on a mobile device.

Here's what we're going to do. We're going to create a folder for you to store all of the sales reports that you build and share with the team. Then we're going to create a summary report of the sales team's opportunities.

We strongly encourage you to get your managers onto reports as soon as possible. Nothing drives adoption like a manager realizing what reporting can show them.

First, let's navigate to the Reports tab. Then click the action for New Folder. We'll call this folder Sales Team Reports and click Save. The folder's unique name will populate automatically.

Now find the folder you just created by accessing the directory on the left-hand side of your page. Under Folders, select Created by Me. To the extreme right, find the dropdown arrow. Select it and click Share.

It's important to share the folder because you can't share specific reports. That's all controlled by the folder they're in.

Click the arrow beside Users to see the sharing options available to you. Let's leave it as Users for now. Find the name of the user you want to grant access to and give them View access.

View access lets them see the reports but not edit them. Edit access lets them edit the reports, and Manage Access gives them folder permissions, such as granting other users access.

We'd suggest leaving this as View for now, until they know more about how to build their own reports. Click Done.

All right, let's create our new report. Select the New Report action and then select Opportunities as the report type.

There are a number of different opportunity report types, but for now, let's just focus on a standard opportunity report that doesn't involve any other objects. Click Continue to take you to the report-building workspace.

From the column on the left, you can see two tabs: Outline and Filters.

Let's look at Filters first, as we're familiar with them from our lesson on list views. We are preparing this report for our sales manager, so we'll leave the first filter at All Opportunities. But let's open up the range of close dates from the Current Fiscal Quarter to All Time and click Apply.

You can opt to have your changes stored and only display when you click the Refresh button, or have every change display in real time by toggling the Update Preview Automatically option.

Let's pretend that the sales manager has asked you to only display opportunities greater than $50,000, as she's not as interested in deals smaller than that.

For this, you will add a custom filter. In the Add Filter field, you'll want to type the name of the field that represents the opportunity amount. We know from our opportunity record that this field is simply called Amount.

Now change the operator to Greater Than and the value to 50,000. Then click Apply.

Note how the Filters tab has a one beside it, which represents the one custom filter that you've added.

Now click on the Outline tab, and let's eliminate some of the existing columns that we don't want and bring in a couple that we do.

It looks like we're not using the field for Owner Role, so why don't we just get rid of it from the report? It's as easy as clicking this X here.

We can also eliminate the Account field if we've taught our team how to properly name opportunities.

Let's do the same for a number of other fields we don't really want. Or, the other way to do this is to remove all the columns and then add only the ones that you care about.

If the pre-built report already has most of the columns you want, then just remove a few and add the others. This is where it's a good idea to have the Update Preview Automatically option turned off.

For the demo, we removed all the fields. So now let's add the desired fields we want to see.

Just key in the name of the field in the Add Column space. For a standard opportunity report, we think the following makes sense:

Opportunity Owner, Opportunity Name, Primary Product Interest—which is a good one for our business, Rocket Shop—Stage, Amount, Probability, Created Date, Last Activity, Close Date, and Age, which is a great column that calculates how old the opportunity is since it was created.

You can add whatever other columns you'd like for your own business, but these ones are pretty standard on most opportunity reports.

Now, what a summary report allows you to do is group the data in any format we want, and group multiple times.

Let's say the sales manager wants to see her sales team's opportunities grouped by Opportunity Owner first, and then grouped by Stage. No problem.

Under Group Rows, in the Add Group field, start typing Owner. Then select Opportunity Owner, and then do the same with Stage.

Watch what happens.

We only have one owner here—me—in our example. But in your real Salesforce, with multiple users, this will have a much greater impact.

Lastly, the sales manager wants to see the total sum of each salesperson's opportunities at each stage, and also the average opportunity amount.

Any of these columns highlighted with a light blue shade allow you to perform mathematical operations. We click on Amount, and then we select Sum and Average.

The sums and average amounts for the opportunities in our two groupings are calculated and displayed.

Once we're satisfied with our report, we click the Save and Run action.

We'll name this report Sales Team Opportunity Report, add a brief description, and save it to the newly created folder.

We can even add a chart for a visual reference of which member of the sales team has the most opportunities and at what stage they're in.

We can change the chart parameters by selecting the gear icon and updating them as we see fit. The charting function is a lot like Excel's chart builder, and it's really just a matter of playing around and seeing your various options.

Now, this is a cool feature. Toggle the Detail Rows switch to Off, and it provides a summary of the report without any of the actual records.

So, there you have it: a very basic summary opportunity report with a chart that your sales manager will love.

In an upcoming lesson, we will show you how to download other very useful sales reports that have been pre-built by Salesforce, which you can then customize or modify to your liking using some of what we've taught you here.

Okay, so that was a very basic introduction to reports. We could literally spend half a day on reports and list views, but again, the objective for this course is just to give you some of the basics.

Plus, with your new Salesforce knowledge, I bet you'll be able to figure out a lot more about reporting all on your own.

We're going to cover dashboards shortly, but first, we want to show you the AppExchange. If you're wondering why we're doing that before a dashboard, it'll become apparent pretty soon.

Talk to you then.