Set-up of a KPI-based Sales Reporting System for Pacific Green - a leading cleantech company

About the client: Pacific Green Technologies Group is becoming a world leader at providing sustainable cleantech solutions: renewable energy, clean water, clean air, and efficient use of electricity. These solutions help solve climate warming, green energy, and resource scarcity challenges.

Scope of the Reporting System Project

• Definition of sales-financials/KPIs and a report structure based on PacificGreen Technologies’ business model and sales-objectives
• Development of a unified definition and naming-structure and reports across all dashboards
• Setting up of Pipedrive Insights reports and dashboards
• Daily communication of report implementation progress through short review cycles with the customer
• Additional refinements to the generated reports and dashboards based on holistic feedback on the overall reporting structure
• Final acceptance of the designed reporting structure and dashboards with the client

Duration of the project: 10 days

Stefan specializes in digital strategy/transformation, digital marketing & sales (along the entire customer journey), and product management. He has over 20 years of experience in process management within different organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 500 corporations, serving both B2B and B2C customers. He is an advocate of intensive communication to understand the client's needs. Cooperation for him always begins with understanding customers, market, technology, and competition.

During the project, he drew on his profound knowledge of sales processes, reporting, and implementation of CRM tools like Pipedrive or Salesforce.

Through focused work with Pacific Green Technologies, the respective dashboards and reports were developed.

When implementing standard SaaS software like Pipedrive, the key is to understand the structure of individual reports and an analytical approach to the problem. My experience in the green energy space helped to understand those needs and advise the client approaches to generate additional insights. Due to the short time frame for implementation, the project needed to be completed with efficient operation and cooperation skills.

Stefan Behrendt, SoftwareSupp CRM Freelancer

Within ten days, the reporting system was customized to meet all customer requirements. Within the project, I have conducted the following tasks:

• Definition of sales-KPIs and dashboards as well as of the overall report structure
• Development of a unified naming structure for dashboards and reports across all dashboards
• Building reporting system for standard fields like revenue as well as for custom fields like quote type, technology, and territory
• Creating Dashboards for every sales-region
• Setting restrictions on reports visibility, based on the user’s role and region
• Reviewing and aligning dashboards with the client in an agile way of working

Now, the generated reports and dashboards are used by regional managers and account managers for sales management and onboarding new employees. One single source of data and a unified visualization for the performance evaluation enables the development of measures and sales activity plans. Efficient communication between departments in the company - based on a single source of truth from Pipedrive CRM-data facilitates efficient and effective sales operations. Connecting a CRM with a custom report solution can help you understand a 360 degree view of your leads based on your custom attributes (e.g. sales activity mix).

Reporting system - The Project Challenge

Due to its rapid growth across its various sales-regions and multiple products/technologies, PacificGreen needed a sophisticated sales dashboard based on its CRM. It was implemented to efficiently manage their sales pipeline based on clear financial and non-financial KPIs using Pipedrive embedded Insights and Reports functionality.

Core project requirements from PacificGreen:

• A comprehensive overview about sales figures and KPIs along the entire customer journey and across all sales-regions
• Complementation of financial figures with non-financial and process KPIs
• Gaining insights into the growth of new products and technologies
• Management of sales on a global scale as well as on the regional level

Reporting system need to be used by the head of sales, regional sales managers, and account managers to track sales progress across different projects and technologies.

Project Approach

PacificGreen decided to base its dashboard on Pipedrive’s reporting functionality since these dashboards and reports allow quickly gaining a visually driven overview of all relevant sales figures and KPIs. Additionally, reporting system allow to drill down to the single opportunity to achieve a 360° degree view of all deal-related figures and activities. Insights and reports allow creating reports based on standard and custom fields across the entire Pipedrive database. Results can be grouped, filtered, and monitored to reveal the most granular information within opportunities acquired sales volume by sales executive, deal conversion rates, etc.

According to Pipedrive data, only 2% of the first customer meetings end with the immediate sale. The remaining 98% of potential customers need to be followed up and nurtured through your sales process.

That is why it is important to create reports and analyzes which enable closing more deals.

By using CRM system, the head of sales can predict growth and detect deal-conversion issues. Reporting system make it possible to control activities and thus to monitor the effectiveness of the chosen sales approach. Using this tool augments daily work about which sales approaches are beneficial and which aren’t. Keeping track of PacificGreen’s goals enables to deliver against sales targets consistently. Overall, the use of CRM Insights and reports makes the sales process more effective.

PacificGreen was looking for extensive coverage of its sales activities across multiple regions via various Dashboards. First, a unified, consistent naming structure and uniform definition of KPIs and report-views with respective report configuration parameters across all dashboards were developed:

The project's goal was to provide worldwide sales management at PacificGreen Technologies with an up-to-date overview of global sales performance.

Therefore, the reporting system is based on sales-KPIs like a number of deals, revenue-forecast, etc. Additionally, the indicators had to be adjusted for different sales regions: North America, Eastern Europe, etc.

These dashboards were created for onboarding new account managers, deal tracking, and sales reviews between account managers and the head of sales. Management on such a large scale requires proper planning and monitoring.

PacificGreen is a company that serves different regions with a wide diversity of various technologies. Thus, the implemented system enables effective sales management on every type of market and across multiple technologies and products.

On-demand work with Freelancer specializing in reporting systems

PacificGreen’s essential requirement was the immediate availability of a Pipedrive Expert and a quick implementation by a skilled consultant. The client needed a specialist who has a background in sales management and data analytics. PacificGreen hired Stefan with SoftwareSupp as a specialist who perfectly matched the project requirements. Multi-year experience in Green Energy, customer journeys, and sales management allowed him to understand assumptions quickly.

‍It also helped him to make recommendations for improving the existing KPI-reporting system. The entire planning, communication, and documentation during the implementation of the Pipedrive-reports and dashboards took place via the SoftwareSupp project product.