Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 & Goal Management

This is an expanded version of an article that will be appearing in the December 2010 edition of The Summit, Summit Group Software’s quarterly magazine. If you are interested, feel free to check out The Summit, we love new readers!

In previous editions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, goal management was primarily relegated to the use of the present, yet hardly usable, Sales Quotas, the installation of a clever accelerator from CodePlex or the creation of your own custom entities to accommodate your goal management needs. None of which are (even in the most liberal sense of the word) “scalable”. Microsoft introduces a very viable solution to this gap in functionality with the inclusion of Goal Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, users can create goals for users or teams. These goals can measure anything from sales numbers to customer satisfaction to nearly any other kind of metric. For example, if a customer service manager wants to track the number of surveys returned by customers that ranked overall satisfaction of their service seven or higher, a goal could be setup to be associated with a customer service team and the metrics could be evaluated against a custom entity called Survey. Additionally, when one considers user acceptance and use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one of the most challenging things to glean from the raw data is, “Is anyone creating or modifying records? If so, how many? ” Goal management can provide a great deal of insight into your customer interactions and if your users and teams are progressing towards particular thresholds that are measures or indicators of success.

Let’s take a look at a real example….

In this example, a sales manager wants to evaluate how many completed phone calls her sales team is making and completing. She establishes a goal of 160 over the next two months.

For any goal there are metrics that we track our progress against. The first thing we will want to do is create a Goal Metric goal called, “Weekly Completed Phone Call Goal”.

Next, it is important to define the criteria for evaluating a phone call record to ascertain whether or not it should be counted against a goal or not. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 these are called Rollup Fields records. For any one goal metric we can create multiple rollup fields. In this example, we’ll create just one.

Once we have determined what is being evaluated, the goals for each salesperson can be set up. To do this, we will create a Goal Record for each salesperson. When creating the goal, we will associate our goal metric created above to the goal. Additionally, for this example, the goal owner will be a sales team member named, Alan Jackson. When defining any goal, it is important to give it a time frame to evaluate progress against. On our goal record, we will set the goal period to for a particular date range. In this example, we’ll select October 2, 2010 to December 2, 2010.

You’ll notice that, when establishing goals in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, we can define both parent and child goals. Thus, in a scenario where the goals you establish for your users are a little more complex or multi-faceted than the example above, the application can accommodate it.

In the screen shot above, you’ll notice that there is more information towards the bottom of the form which is not immediately visible. When we scroll down in that window, we see the following additional information:

The actuals, as the name implies, shows us how we are progressing against the goal. The field to pay particular attention in this example is the Rollup Query-Actual (Integer) field. If needed, a goal can be defined against a particular subset of data. For example, if the goal was being established for a particular subset of accounts, a Rollup Query could be created where the user can define exactly which records the goal will be evaluated against. In this example, however, we will keep our scenario simple. Once saved, the goal setter can run an initial recalculation to see where the salesperson is currently at with their progress towards the goal. Additionally, default Microsoft Dynamics CRM reports such as the “Progress Against Goals” or embedded charts available by default allow goal administrators and users the ability to see how their teams are or personally are progressing against any particular goal type or metric.

This inclusion of a truly viable goal management solution in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is just one of the litanies of reasons why Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is worth the purchase or worth an upgrade from version 4.0.

Contact a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner to learn more.