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Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Goals

Post Author: Joe D365 |

Introduction to microsoft dynamics CRM goals

Goal! That's one word that brings us ultimate happiness when our favorite team scores in a soccer game. Also, we sometimes bump into random motivational speakers at airports and they tell us only one thing – Have a goal! Since we are MS Dynamics CRM experts, we decided to use the amazing Dynamics CRM Goals feature to measure pretty much everything. How many times do we go to the woods and parallel park our company car under a waterfall to get it washed? How many unicycles do we see every day in Hipster Mecca (aka Uptown Minneapolis)? How much revenue do we make by selling our services to our awesome clients who love what we do?

Don't be intimidated by Goals. It is a very powerful yet easy feature that can provide very good insights. Estimated/Actual revenue in a fiscal period, number of products sold, number of new clients, number of unwashed mugs in the sink etc. – with just a few clicks, you can be handed the world of useful information on a silver platter. Here is a simple example that would help you understand Goals. After reading this post, we hope you will become more comfortable with this amazing feature, and use it frequently to measure your required metrics.

Alright, let's get started!

Here's a scenario – let's suppose your company sells concert tickets. You, as the sales manager of your company want to track how much revenue your sales agent is bringing in in the current fiscal period, and how many tickets they have sold.

In order to get those numbers, you need three things in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

  1. Goal
  2. Goal Metric
  3. Rollup Field

A goal would give you the actual figures, be it revenue or number of tickets sold. Every goal needs a goal metric which essentially tells the goal if the metric being measured is a number or $ amount. A goal metric has rollup fields which are nothing but actual and estimated values of the goal being measured (estimated/actual revenue and estimated/actual number of tickets sold in our case).

To start creating a Goal, you would go to your Sales area, click Goals, and then New on the ribbon to create a new Goal.

On the new Window, give the goal a Name. To associate this goal with a specific sales agent, do a lookup on the Goal Owner field and choose their name. For the sake of this example, let's create a new Goal Metric by clicking the lookup icon and clicking New on the Goal Metric lookup window.

Dynamics CRM goals--create a goal metric

On the Goal Metric form, give the metric a name, and choose Metric Type Amount.

Note: Count only returns the number of rows, not the actual values. So choose Amount for Metric Type. For Amount Data Type, choose Money if you are tracking revenue or Integer if you are tracking numbers (number of tickets in our case).

You can also track stretch targets. For example, a sales agent may have a target of bringing in $5,000 revenue and a stretch target of $7,000.

Once those fields have been filled, save the record. It is now time to add Rollup Fields to this Goal Metric.

Click the "Add New Rollup Field" to add rollup fields.

Dynamics CRM goals--add a new rollup field

You would now create rollup fields for actual and estimated values (separate).

We will set the Rollup Field to Actual (Money) (and In Progress (Money) for estimated revenue) because we are tracking revenue. Our source field is in the Opportunity entity, so we choose Opportunity as the Source Record Type. Set Source Field to Actual Revenue or Est. Revenue based on the type of Rollup Field you are setting. If you are tracking revenue for a particular product, set Source Record Type Status to that specific product.

Finally, set the record Type to the entity from where the value is coming (Opportunity in our case), and set the Date Field to Actual Close Date (for actual revenue; choose Est. Close Date for estimated revenue).

Save and Close your Rollup Field window first, and then the Goal Metric window.

And that's it! On your Goal form, choose a period for which you want to track the actual revenue, and hit Recalculate. The actual revenue that this sales person has brought in so far is shown in the Actual (Money) field (and also Percentage Achieved).

You can repeat this procedure to create goals for actual and estimated number of tickets sold.

Happy CRM'ing!

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

6 comments on “Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Goals”

  1. hi, one quick question. can u pls tel me how to add 3 column tab with 3 sections in entity form crm 2011

  2. What are some best practices for automatically creating goals... or do most people do it manually at the beginning of each fiscal period?

  3. please help me...

    How can I measure the invoice for each account?
    1.I want to set my goals for each individual client(contact or Account).
    2. then measure the invoice(paid) for each account.

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