Any successful ways to simplify reporting?

[Dawn_Richcreek]

Our reporting process is too manual intensive. We have weekly and monthly report templates in Excel. We currently copy and paste from several different Salesforce reports and Marketo reports (and others like google analytics and social platforms). This takes a couple hours every Monday to create a week-ending report. Are there any free processes or paid tools you are using to point Excel fields to various salesforce and marketo reports that can be updated with a single click?

[Gerard_Donnell4]

I don't think there is an easy fix for this.

What does your weekly and monthly report consist of? There may be ways to pull lots of the data into Salesforce dashboards and reduce some of the overhead. 

[Dawn_Richcreek]

Hi Gerard,

It is an assortment of things. But here is some of it:

- Number of MQLs created for the week broken down by GEO, Campaign Name and Company Size Segment

- Number of SQLs created for the week broken down by GEO, Campaign Name and Company Size Segment

- Number of Engaged created for the week broken down by GEO, Campaign Name, Company Size Segment as well as if it is Net-New Engaged or if it has been Re-engaged

- De-duplicated MQLs + SQLs + Engaged

- Number of software trial downloads for the week broken down by product line and GEO

- Number of Emails delivered for the week

- Number of Net-new customers acquired for the week and the dollar value of sales

- Total Impressions from re-targeting, display, social, etc, etc

- Clicks / responses from all channels (PPC, re-targeting, display, social, email, etc, etc)

- Total video views for the week

- Marketing influenced Pipeline - opened, won, closed lost (opportunities with Primary and just Influenced)

None of this is hard to get and track, it is just time consuming.

If you have any suggestions

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi Dawn,

There are plenty of ways to simplify and cross-reference reporting, but a large part of that is migrating away from Excel. I know people get very comfortable with the powers of Excel, but it's really a matter of finding another tool that allows you to do that level of manipulation and analysis in a live platform rather than trying to do it offline.

Also, reporting (and math) can and often does get horribly butchered inside spreadsheets.

It's hard to give a good recommendation on what a solution is here, especially because I don't know how much Excel is the lynchpin here (at bare minimum reporting should be done out of say, Access and data connectors) but in terms of long-term things I'd recommend you're looking at anywhere from $50 to $5,000+ a month depending on your specific needs.

If you want to discuss in more detail so there's a bit more nuance, feel free to shoot me a PM.