USING DATA TO DRIVE DECISION-MAKING
Creating KPIs using Salesforce
At Steelcase I manage international creative team. Our purpose is to elevate the Steelcase brand through customer-facing materials, and help win business. We do this by translating strategies from sales leaders and account managers into print and digital designs.
Salesforce is the tool that drives day-to-day operations, capturing creative requests from around North America. We use it as you would similar tools like Asana – tracking work in progress, sharing files, and communicating with stakeholders – with the added benefit of understanding project volume and win rates.
Prioritization and efficiency are critical. I have created a dashboard of KPIs that ensure work is within our scope, and is being completed per the expectations set forth. KPIs monitored include:
- Case revisions by type
- Projects with most revisions
- Cancelled creative projects
- Cases per fiscal quarter
- Cases per month by owner
- Lead time average by case type
- Total cases
- Win/loss
- Total sales impact
In this example, I am tracking the number of cases per month by owner. In addition to understanding each creative team member's capacity and how it changes over time, I can also make insights that might reveal opportunities for improvement, such as:
- Reduction in cases = trouble managing expectations (scope creep)
- Reduction in cases = needs training to tackle other types of work
- Increase in cases = needs more challenging work
- Increase in cases = not scoping and assigning work evenly
- Average number of cases = helps set expectations for role