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How to Perform Salesforce Cross-Object Reporting by Sales Rep

Oct 05th, 2018

This blog post was originally published by Rekener, now a Brainshark company.

Cross-object reporting is one of the things that Salesforce is just not designed to do.  It frustrates sales leaders, sales ops people, and anyone else that’s looking to build meaningful reports to assess sales performance.  This post talks about what cross-object reporting is, and how you can make it happen.

What is Cross-Object Reporting in Salesforce?

Cross-object reporting is building a report that takes data from multiple Salesforce objects and presents that data in the same report.  For example, building a report that shows the number of leads created, tasks created and opportunities created by sales rep is a cross-object report.

Why is Cross-Object Reporting useful?

There is huge value in cross-object reporting because it tells you the full story of what a sales rep is doing, rather than just showing data from one object at a time.  And, once you’re able to pull data from multiple Salesforce objects into the same report, then you can start looking at more advanced metrics that really shine a light on what’s going on.  For example, you might want to report on the number of calls that each of your reps is making (Tasks), as well as how many opportunities they’ve created (Opportunities). Once you have that data in the same report, you can now create a ratio to figure out how many calls it takes for a rep to open an opp.

What are some workarounds for Cross-Object Reporting?

The usual workaround to get cross-object reports for your Salesforce data is to pull data out to Excel.  This requires multiple Salesforce reports to be run (one from each object), and exported to Excel, and then all of those reports to be joined together manually.  It’s time consuming and not very dynamic — if you want to look at a different date range for example, you would need to create a whole new spreadsheet.

Cross-Object Reporting with Salesforce data: Use Sales Rep Scorecards

Rekener (now Brainshark) is designed to do Cross-Object reporting with Salesforce data.  The Sales Rep Scorecard app automatically produces amazing cross-object reports that let you see data from any object, by sales rep.  So you can see in one concise table, how many calls, emails, demos, opps, deals and bookings each of your sales reps has — over any time period.  It’s incredibly simple, yet powerful.

Cross-object reporting with Salesforce data

What else can you do with Cross-object reporting?

Once you can pull multiple Salesforce objects into the same place, you can do other cool things.  For example, creating ratios between metrics from different objects (like calls divided by demos to figure out how many calls it takes a rep to set a demo).  Or, you can create scores for your sales reps. Scoring reps means you want to assign a weight to different metrics, and then multiply the weight times the value, to get an overall score.  So, for example, calls might be worth a point, demos worth 2 points, and opps worth 3 points. Then, for each rep, you can multiply their metrics by their weights to see an overall score that lets you stack rank the team.

Want to learn more? Check out this blog post on leading indicators for sales managers to Track, or contact our solutions consultants to learn more about what scorecards can do for you.