Get rid of reporting headaches with slicers

Reporting possibilities grow with your company, and Sales Operations needs to keep up the pace. Your Sales team grows, your engineering team builds new products, your sales organization is getting more complicated, and Sales Operations is crunching data every day. The Sales team needs the most flexible and user-friendly business intelligence tools to be efficient. They shouldn’t waste time creating their reports and dashboards, but they need to be able to check their key metrics at a glance.

For instance, they should be able to check their billings by accounts, by fiscal year, by product, by industry, by territory, by billing type…  Let’s suppose there are 10 sales reps in your team and each of them has 200 accounts; there are 5 fiscal years, 5 products, 20 industries, 10 territories and 5 billings types. There are too many possibilities for Sales Operations to handle. The cheap trick is using Queries and Pivot Tables with Slicers. Of course, you can invest in business intelligence software like Tableau, InsightSquared, Looker and Wave Analytics. Nevertheless, you can achieve many things with Excel.

In our example above, there are 7 dimensions. Excel Power Query extracts data from an external source to Excel. If you want to extract Salesforce data, go to Data > New Query > From Other Sources > From Salesforce Objects.Create a table with Excel Power Query, add a Pivot Table and create a Pivot Table Chart. You can then add pivot table slicers to build something like this. To add slicers, click on your pivot and go to Analyze > Insert Slicer.

This business tool is scalable, maintainable, user-friendly and flexible. That’s why the Sales team will love it and ask for more. Don’t forget to track your tool adoption by reading this post.