Everyone wants simple and clear access to figures, status updates, and progress—in real time! Good reports are essential for gaining an overview of sales and customer processes. But which reports should a sales team have to get the best possible overview? And how can these reports provide both a clear overview and insights at the detailed and individual level? In this webinar, you will get inspiration and tips on how your company should set up effective real-time sales reports that provide sales managers, analysts, and the sales department with the insights they need to improve the efficiency and profitability of sales processes. Yuliia is our Power BI expert and will show you which reports a sales department should have. Watch the presentation and demo here:

Transcript of the video about sales reports in Power BI:

What types of reports should a sales department have?

Frode Stenstrøm: Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the world of Power BI reports, where data is transformed into insights and decisions become data-driven. We'll look at six reports that we believe every sales department should have to operate as effectively as possible. But before we get into the reports, I'd like to tell you a short story.

About six or seven years ago, we at ProsessPilotene decided to become data-driven. Since then, we have worked systematically to capture, process, analyze, and report data, creating effective Power BI reports for each group, including employees, consultants, managers, sales teams, and so on.

Through this work, we have also gained some insight into which reports work. Some reports have been very good but have not been used. Other reports have been very, very poor and have not been used, but at least our experience over the years has shown us which reports have helped us and enabled us to grow as quickly as we have.

And those are the reports related to sales that we will show and share with you today. To help us do just that, I have invited my colleague Yuliia into the studio. She is a specialist in Parabia reports and will demonstrate the reports that we believe you and your sales department can benefit from.

Welcome, Julie!

Yuliaa Kamkova: Thank you.

Frode Stenstrøm: First time here.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, thank you for inviting me.

Frode Stenstrøm: So, who are you?

Yuliaa Kamkova: My name is Julie. I’m from Ukraine, and I’ve lived in Norway for five years. And I work as a functional consultant at ProsessPiloten.

Frode Stenstrøm: And I know you have some interests, Yuliia. What do you do in your spare time? Or do you even have any spare time?

Yuliaa Kamkova: Not much. I’m currently working on finishing my PhD in medical image analysis. So I like looking at different kinds of data, including sales data. And I build various reports to provide a bit more insight and... Yes, not just for me, but for everyone.

Frode Stenstrøm: For everyone, yes. And I usually say that Yuliia creates Power BI reports that don't look like Power BI, and that's a good thing.

They communicate very well, and they’re the ones whose work we’ll be showing you a little later today. My name is Frode Stenstrøm, and I’ll be your host today. A little about today’s broadcast: We’re streaming live on YouTube, as we always do. The broadcast is interactive, so if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them as we go. And then we have...

Please tell us who you are and where you are from. We will add subtitles to the recording afterwards. Please allow up to 24 hours for the subtitles and chapters to be added, so that you can watch the exact report you want without having to watch the entire video just to see, for example, a sales report. And please like, share, and subscribe.

There will be more webinars in the future, so keep an eye on our YouTube channel. And with that, Yuliia, I thought I’d let you tell the audience a little about today’s agenda.

Yuliaa Kamkova: So, we have quite a full agenda today. First, we'll look at what makes a good report, how to identify needs in order to create value, and how to ensure that the report is used correctly.

Next, who will use the report and what these reports will be used for. After that, we will also talk about the recommended sales reports that we can show you. There will also be a demo, which I think is the most interesting part, showing how to create these types of reports.

Frode Stenstrøm: And that is what provides the overall insight in the report, and I thought I would start by talking a little about, well, that part of it, because, let's see, if I can just do this and that, then the thing is that when we talk about reports, including here at ProsessPilotene, different marketing departments and other departments have different reporting needs.

A marketing and customer communications unit—those typically involved in customer acquisition or customer communications—has its own reporting needs. The sales department clearly has its own, delivery has its own, service has its own, and then there are other reports, for example on finances and HR.

In this overview, we show some of the classic reports that are relevant, and we would actually like to run separate webinars on each of these areas. Today, however, we are focusing on sales, as this has been a major topic in our recent webinars. These reports cover customer acquisition, customer retention, delivery follow-up, and customer life cycles, so we have strong reporting support for customers. What all these reports have in common is that they are built on a single dataset and a shared reporting platform, with the information presented in slightly different ways depending on the target audience that needs the reports.

And then there is the question of who the sales insights are actually for, Yuliia. When we talk about sales insights, there are often three target groups that emerge from our demo environment, which we have chosen to call Miljøpilotene. First, there is Kristin, the general manager of Miljøpilotene, who needs to know whether they are meeting their sales forecasts.

Then you have Eirik, the salesperson who works there and is responsible for sales, right? But then there’s also Sofie, who works in marketing and may be responsible for bringing in customers for the sales department. And just a quick note here: All employees need sales insights, but these are the primary groups we’re focusing on in today’s webinar when we talk about sales reports.

And just to sum it up, this is what we’re going to take a closer look at: the sales forecast, for which you have an interactive report to show. Eirik, who works in sales, will also need the same sales forecast. But what often happens in a company’s sales department is that once they’ve sold something, it’s useful to know the delivery status.

We also have a number of sample reports that allow salespeople to proactively monitor how delivery is progressing over time. Then there is the new sales department, which is connected to marketing and says that they have been promised a report on this. For example, are we spending the right amount of money on the right initiatives, yes or no?

And then it becomes—let's see—like this, and then it becomes like this, like this, like this. That's where you start. You're supposed to begin by showing a live demo of the lead section or the first report.

Yes, so first we're going to look at two things. First, there will be a live demo covering leads, followed by the service pipeline. And the third report we'll look at together is activities or sales results, so we'll take a look at that.

We will also look at some screenshots of reports that may be very interesting and useful for the three people we saw earlier, including delivery status, customer, and

Customer follow-up and revenue.

Frode Stenstrøm: Right. And our thinking here is that we show three reports live. Of course, we have many more live reports, but once we set up the first three, they also provide examples of how the others are structured, so we can, well, make it very precise.

And then we'll switch over and bring it up—actually, now we have your PC, Yuliia, so... Could you just open the first report?

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then I'll remove it so you can get it up and running.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes. Thank you, Frode.

Frode Stenstrøm: And then we'll just do it like this. I'll move us around a little, depending on the situation. I think we should position ourselves there, because that's where we'll be least in the way.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Maybe, yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: But the first report on July 1 is the leads pipeline—in other words, the prospects—and all marketing units are measured on one thing: generating as many prospects as possible, or “leads” in English, so that there is something to sell. Having nothing to sell is very unfortunate. And I think the great thing about this report, Yuliia, which you are going to walk us through, is that I can see whether we are using the right resources on the right things to generate prospects. So could you just walk us through how you structured this report?

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, so I can say that this report may be of interest to them. It is like the third report you mentioned, so all three groups can look at it: marketing, salespeople, and sales managers. We can review the lead sources and see which of these sources actually generates the most sales. But first, I can say that we are now on the Power BI website, and you can receive the report as a link by email or on Teams, or it can be shared with you directly on the Power BI website.

And here, we are now on

the workspace, which is called Report Example. Yes, and we have three pages of sales reports covering sales opportunities, the service pipeline, and employee results. And when you're on the Power BI website, don't be afraid to click or adjust anything, because you always have the green button. So if you click something and think, “Oh, this doesn't look the way it did at the beginning,” you can always click here to restore it to how it was before.

And perhaps the last thing I want to look at here is that you can subscribe to a report. So if you want to tailor the report to your needs—the date range, salesperson, or customer you are interested in—you can save these settings and subscribe to the report that way.

So every morning, you can start your day with an email from the Power BI website. Hey, take a look at it.

Frode Stenstrøm: So then you get a report by email about what happened?

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, or Teams—it’s up to you how you’d like to receive it.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, that's correct.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, so let's take a closer look in full-screen mode. Yes, perhaps that's better now. So, first of all, this report currently shows data for each individual salesperson, such as Axel, but we can also view all the salespeople, which may make it more useful for the sales manager or the company's management.

The first thing I want to point out is that we are now building a report for a company that sells furniture. So all the sales opportunities we are going to look at will be furniture-related. And everything here is... artificial data, so we are not showing any confidential information. Everything here is fictional data.

Yes, so let's get started. First, we can look at the data period and see how leads, opportunities, and won opportunities performed over 2023. So, in a way, this is the sales funnel we can see. Here, we can view it over the period, but we can also switch to a quarterly or annual view, because this was only one year, but if we...

change it so that we're looking at a two-year period. And here you can use the slider, or you can use what people may be a little more familiar with.

Frode Stenstrøm: Date pickers? Yes, date pickers.

Yuliaa Kamkova: It is also possible to review it every week. But perhaps every month.

Frode Stenstrøm: It looks nicer, at least.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, nice. But it depends somewhat on what you're interested in. If you only want to look at that month, then perhaps the week view in Snabben will be more relevant in this version.

Frode Stenstrøm: I like this report because it shows both the marketing and sales departments whether there are enough leads to work with, because having plenty of sales capacity does not help if there are no leads to talk to. And here, the blue-purple curve shows the number of leads that have come in each month.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, and what is also interesting is that we make sales from these leads. And if we click here, we can see, for example, that we have made three sales from direct marketing. If we click on that, we can see which customers we sold to and which sales opportunities they were. So, modern garden furniture—we sold it for NOK 13,000, which was quite good, and it went from direct sales to Norsk Malemester.

Frode Stenstrøm: Norsk Malemester, yes. But I also think what you're showing now is really useful, because the few reports I've seen before have largely consisted of just one page and a filter. But now I can dig deeper into the report simply by clicking on a bar like that and get related information, saving more time when finding things I would otherwise have had to dig for.

And that’s what I think has been useful for us.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, and that is the biggest difference between Power BI and, for example, an Excel spreadsheet. An Excel spreadsheet gives us some information, but it cannot be connected to different sources. Here, we connect directly to our CRM sales app, so everything is updated almost immediately when the salesperson makes changes in the app, giving us up-to-date information.

And what is also interesting about the interactive aspect is that if we click here, we can see only these sources targeting direct marketing across the entire page. So we can see that we are filtering the chart here, and we can see that sales occurred in August, September, and April. These are the three sales shown here. We also highlight these sales in the sales funnel here.

So there are two ways Power BI can interact internally: by highlighting or filtering. Here we have an example of highlighting, while the one above is in filtering mode.

Frode Stenstrøm: But I also think what is great about these reports is that they allow you to measure which types of sources matter. And this autumn, we at ProsessPilotene will also connect our data sources to Google Analytics, where we have added conversion values.

For example, we can see how many visitors to our website stay there for more than one or two minutes, which is quite a large segment of people. We can even see how many actually fill out the Contact Us form, thereby converting into a lead in Dynamics. This means that you can help us make decisions about whether we should invest more in digital marketing related to YouTube, article writing, or breakfast seminars. And that is what matters: we do not rely on guesswork, but continually spend our money on the things that create the most value for us.

And that is why I think this type of report is useful for all sales departments to have, as it provides a shared space where sales and marketing communications—or the sales department and the marketing communications department—can work together.

Yuliaa Kamkova: And what's great here is that on the Power BI website, you can also leave comments. So if you want to communicate about something in the report—for example, marketing can see that he is making sales—we can select, yes, sorry, going back to Aksel, for example, that there were nine sales here in December. So perhaps they are interested in which sources he used or which customers were most interested.

So they can communicate directly within that report on the Power BI website

Frode Stenstrøm: And there is another factor here, which is that it takes time from when you get a lead, to when you get an opportunity, to when you win it. For some companies, it takes a few days; for others, it can take years. But if you see a downward trend in leads, that will often be a good indication that sales are going to decline.

This alone provides a management system for tracking what comes in.

Yuliaa Kamkova: So perhaps we can look at the next report, which talks a little about the past and the future.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, because the next one was our sales opportunity report.

Yuliaa Kamkova: I call it revenue analysis, but yes, it provides some information about the past and the future, and how sales are performing against the budget. As we can see, it is synchronized, so we now have the same salesperson and the same date, but perhaps we are initially interested in looking at the entire company's revenue. We can see that the green line represents the budget, while the orange line represents actual services.

So those are the sales opportunities that were closed, and the money the company earned. And we can see that after Christmas we exceeded the budget, so perhaps we can take a closer look at the period after Christmas here as well, to get a little more... Yes, from June, for example. Yes, so this gives us a little more detail about the period that was good for the company.

Or we can look at the period that was bad for the company in different ways, but for now, this one.

Frode Stenstrøm: I’d like to add that the report we’re looking at now is one of the reports that, in my experience, a great many of our customers are interested in, because you can see the actual revenue, your budget, what has been sold, and what is known as weighted sales, where you look at the value of the sales opportunities multiplied by the probability of closing them. This provides a very useful management metric, as it produces very good forecasts.

If we look at our own company now, our forecasts are so accurate that, week by week, we know what our revenue will be with only a very small percentage deviation. We use this, for example, to determine whether we need to hire more people. When we see a large number of leads coming in and converting into sales opportunities, it may take 6–9 months before they convert into orders. Based on this report, we therefore already know what staffing levels we will need in 2025 and 2026.

So now you're showing the fictitious data, but in our company we have this report, and it is used in every management team meeting, first thing from 08:00 to 08:05, to show how our business is doing and whether or not we have control over what we're doing.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, as you said, that report was inspired by the report we actually use, but here we created fictitious data so that we don't show our figures.

Frode Stenstrøm: No, we don't show our figures, but this report is so easy to use, and when we talk about a reporting culture, it's about making this report available to the entire company and the management team, while our team leaders can view the figures for their own teams,

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: How the teams are doing. This means that if a team leader notices that something needs to be done, you can see fairly clear trend lines showing how things are developing. Using that operationally to motivate better or more deliveries and things like that, or better sales, helps me sleep well at night because I know we have things under control.

Yuliaa Kamkova: I think the main purpose of these reports is to provide project managers or team leaders with meaningful insights into the processes taking place within the company. So I’m very pleased to hear that, because it means it was a good report.

Frode Stenstrøm: And so you have weighted sales there, but that says something about what we expect to receive. What we often add on top of that—for example, for those of you working in service-based industries, selling consulting hours—is a forecast. If people are allocated to a set of projects, and you know what the allocation is, you can compare it with the hours actually logged and identify any discrepancies. This gives you a better indication of revenue.

Because those of you who make a living from consulting hours depend on the number of hours billed, it is useful to know that the figures are accurate. What we often see in our own reports is that if five consultants suddenly attended a seminar one day that had not been included in our production plan, this results in a discrepancy. But then we understand why the discrepancy occurred: it is either due to things like that or to sick leave we were not aware of.

And being able to work with that again and know that you may need to do something about sick leave or something like that—you can extract a great deal of information from the types of reports we are looking at now.

Yuliaa Kamkova: One more thing here: when the salespeople are trying to sell something—that is, when they have a sales opportunity—they also assess it and provide their forecast of how likely they are to close the sale.

So it can also give us some insight into how accurate those salespeople's forecasts are. Are they good at evaluating the sales opportunity, or could they perhaps be a little more realistic?

Frode Stenstrøm: Absolutely, but there is another important aspect to this: when our salespeople know that the figures they enter into the Dynamics platform are used at so many levels—by management to keep track of finances, by team leaders to monitor employees, and by project managers for reporting to clients—it is very embarrassing to have entered incorrect figures.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: So, as you say, you tend to be more sober in your assessment rather than overly optimistic, but the main point is that the data quality improves.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, and in that report, for example, we can actually look at these, because what they get now are the ongoing sales opportunities. So these are the ones that have been developed and qualified in the sales process, the same as those in the sales app.

But if we want to look at the sales opportunities that were in progress and then lost, we can see what happened here. For example, Aksel thought there was a 125% chance that we would win this one, but we didn't. And it can give us information not only about what we have earned, but also about what we have lost. So it's pretty cool that it can be filtered according to our needs and the analyses we want to perform with it.

And as you can see quite easily, we can always sort this table by, for example, weighted revenue, so that the largest sales opportunities we expect to close appear first. For example, for the first one, we thought we would earn almost half a million, or a little over half a million kroner, and expected it to be completed on the 16th.

October, which again relates to the sales reps' forecasts. He wrote that it would be closed on October 16, but it's now 2024 and it's still open. That means Julie may need to get a little better at sales. I'm good at reporting, not sales. We can see that here.

Frode Stenstrøm: But there is another factor in these reports that I think is important, and that is that a sale is a sale, and for the vast majority of companies, if they sell something today, it may be delivered in a month, or it may even take two years before delivery. The delivery may also need to be spread out over a period of time.

When you have the Dynamics platform, where this data is stored, a project department can, for example, say that this is a project that will last three, six, or eight months. This solves another challenge, namely being able to spread both resource allocation and revenue over the same period, depending somewhat on whether there are payment milestones or monthly payments.

And that is also what we are doing now: we enter a project, we know how long it will last, and then we can also determine the capacity utilization required at the other end. So this type of revenue report provides a great deal of information, and the good thing about it is that a management team can use it to monitor the overall picture, a team can track a specific item, a salesperson can follow up on an individual customer, and the sales manager can see how the sales force is performing as a whole.

I really recommend that all our customers purchase this type of report, so just contact her and you’ll get it.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Not just me, we have several others.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, we have several, but at least let's take the best ones. Then we can, but I thought we should talk a little about the level of activity.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes

yes.

Frode Stenstrøm: Because the reality is that when we don't achieve the sales we're supposed to achieve, there's often a reason for it.

And when we don't achieve the sales results, my experience is that the activity level isn't right. And I'm not saying that the salespeople aren't working. The vast majority of salespeople I know work extremely hard. But often, they may be working on the wrong things. One example might be choosing to spend a lot of time on email and sending emails to customers, rather than spending that time talking to customers.

And being able to know where you stand right now, looking at the activity level and how it is developing, can serve as an early warning. So, assuming you have enough leads but the activity level is low, you implicitly understand that this is not going to generate any sales opportunities.

Yuliaa Kamkova: So it is important to look at the activities that the salespeople actually carry out.

And here we have a few different types of filtering. We cannot select the salesperson here, but we can select them directly on the chart. For example, if we are interested in Aksel, when we click on him, we see the activities he is engaged in. We can see that he has lots of phone calls, all the activities he is working on, and the associated sales opportunities. It is also possible to filter, so, for example, we can see that there were many phone calls, but perhaps also a lot of discussion.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, those are all the activities we can have on a platform.

Yuliaa Kamkova: But he doesn't have that many messages, so he mostly uses the phone, and he does so effectively.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, that's the great thing about being able to see those trends. At my previous employer, we conducted an analysis. We had a lot of salespeople there, and we analyzed who used the Dynamics CRM system the most and who never logged in.

And then we conducted a similar analysis of who sold the most and who sold the least. There was almost a one-to-one correlation: those who used the CRM system, planned their sales, and carried out the right activities achieved strong sales results, while those who sold the least had not even logged in to the CRM system or used it.

So we can certainly laugh about it a little, but these reports are a very useful management tool for sales leadership. They allow us to see whether we are working in the right way to achieve the results we set out to achieve. And that is really part of what we have been discussing. We began by asking whether the marketing and communications department has been working effectively to generate leads, how many leads they generate, and whether those leads then result in sales. That was the first point.

This is a report that we as sales managers should use to see whether our sales department is working effectively. The second is more about supporting the salesperson, seeing how ongoing sales are progressing, and providing revenue figures and reporting. We think these three reports are excellent tools for monitoring sales or a sales department.

I would say the second report, because what is so useful about it is that if you do not use the CRM system to log emails, activities, or phone calls, you make things very difficult for your colleagues.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, yes. So all these activities are pulled directly from the CRM, which means you have to log every activity.

That's right. So use the CRM system, and then it will look correct here.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, we can... if we search for the dollar signs?

Yuliaa Kamkova: Then we can see the money, and then we can see... Which company that salesperson sold the most to. And perhaps we actually have a breakdown across 100% of the sales. So yes, we know that it looks like all the salespeople were quite optimistic.

Or if they closed all the sales opportunities. So that was it. So it's possible to... Work with these reports in different ways, which I'll show you.

Frode Stenstrøm: But again, that's what's so great: you can add information to a single report and switch between the two, so you don't have to jump in and out of another report to get a little more information. And again, you have that interactive element, which I think is fantastic.

And quite apart from that, you can see that we have used ProsessPilotene's colors and branding here to create the reports. And we can do that for you as well, so that the reports look like your reports and not just some randomly selected report from the internet. So those were really the reports we were going to talk about now, primarily today, in relation to...

Let's see, those were the reports we were going to talk about that we had live. I thought we'd just say a little about one more report that we find really useful to include. Let's see if I can get this right now. There we go, yes. So, assuming the sale has been completed, once the salesperson has sold something, it's important for that same salesperson to know how the delivery is progressing, preferably before something goes wrong.

And if you work with project sales, for example, it is useful to know that if I am to deliver a certain number of hours of work to the customer per week, then, as we mentioned earlier, it is helpful to know the difference between the number of hours sold and the number of hours worked. This does not tell us whether the quality is good, but it does indicate whether we are on track.

Very often, what tends to happen in the service industry is that those who are supposed to do the work may be running a little behind or were working on other assignments before they joined. So, in ProsessPilotene, we have what we call a delivery status or production variance report, where you can view the project manager, the salesperson—that is, the KAM—the employee, the customer, and so on.

And this report is visible to the employees working on the projects, as well as the salesperson and project managers, so that everyone works from the actual allocation. I have now redacted all the values in the report, because this is our own report, which we still use today. But this report can help explain discrepancies.

So if you start a management meeting by noting that revenue is falling short and wondering why, you can go straight to the delivery status report and see why there is a shortfall in delivery. Well, perhaps it was because someone was ill, or the customer had not started it—in other words, the customer was unavailable. There may be many explanations, but then you know that you may only need to speak to two people to find out what caused the discrepancy.

And in that sense, be proactive in preventing delivery failures. This is the day-to-day operation that I know many of our salespeople monitor, without having to keep asking the project managers, “What’s the status? What’s the status? What’s the status?” The next report concerns what happens when things have been delivered and invoiced: some customers, even though it is not permitted, choose not to pay their bills as a way of demonstrating that they are dissatisfied.

And knowing what is overdue is also an early warning that our salespeople need in order to determine whether there is anything they should follow up on. Do they need to contact the customer? Is there anything they need to keep an eye on? And here we have a similar report where some data and fields have been removed because this is somewhat sensitive information, but it is essentially the names of the salespeople.

So every salesperson uses that report frequently, as soon as an invoice is not paid on time. Instead of sending it to debt collection and taking all those drastic measures, they can have a dialogue with their customer and understand what is happening and why. So one aspect is monitoring things on an ongoing basis before they are invoiced, while the other is looking at what happens after they have been invoiced.

Yuliaa Kamkova: It’s important to interpret.

Frode Stenstrøm: And the final report I thought we would show today is simply hard-core revenue data. You mentioned your excellent report showing service revenue, but there are two reports that we find extremely useful. One of them shows actual revenue by product group—that is, both service revenue and product sales—as well as how it is allocated across periods. In the report shown here in Power BI, you can drill down. For example, if you have a new customer, you can click the plus sign to see how many consulting hours and how many products they have purchased, along with that type of information. This report is extremely useful.

And this report comes in two versions: one is a straightforward revenue report, while the other is what we call lifetime value. The lifetime value report is extremely important because it allows us to identify revenue patterns across our customer base of roughly 250 customers. For example, we see that many customers invest heavily in year 1, a little in year 2, then maintain their investment level in year 3, before starting to invest more again in years 3, 4, and 5.

And that means it’s important for us to engage with the customer at the right time. That’s where the lifetime value reports come in, showing the value a customer creates. Even if they may be very small today, they often become large customers within a year. So those were the six reports we were going to review, and I thought we could take a look at how we created them and just talk a little about the process, since you’ve created these reports many times.

And there is a workflow involved, and the first step is to ask ourselves what we need. That is where we are trying to provide some inspiration for you today: What reports does the sales department need? Perhaps you could simply take the six reports we have created and implement them. But then you come in, and that is where data quality comes into play.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, it’s extremely important to spend quite a lot of time on this to make sure you have the right data for the specific question we want to answer with these reports, and also to build a data model, because the data model used in Power BI needs to be good so that all the calculations we perform in Power BI give us the correct figures.

Because it may display some figures, but they could be completely wrong simply because of the data model. So it is also quite important to connect all the tables and all the data to each other correctly. And then there is the data warehouse—where to store the data or which sources to connect to. We can connect to a CRM, as I have already mentioned, but it is also possible to connect to an SQL database or a pre-existing data warehouse built in Data Factory or something similar. It can also be connected to an Excel spreadsheet, for example. If the company previously used only Excel spreadsheets to manage everything, those spreadsheets can still be used, but the result will be a little more interactive and perhaps a little more visually appealing than just a table.

Frode Stenstrøm: That's absolutely right.

And

On our YouTube channel, we have a video called “What Is Microsoft Fabric?” that you can watch. It is a very popular video that has already been viewed many thousands of times. In it, we explain the technology Microsoft is using as its foundation—Fabric—and how Power BI fits into it. But the main message I want to share with you now is that building a data warehouse can be done much more affordably and easily than before.

Technology has advanced to the point where you no longer need to pay hundreds of thousands of kroner for a data warehouse. You can use Fabric and get started at a fairly reasonable cost. You can collect and process your data, and I also know that our analytics team is quite good at using that data to implement forecasting models.

It is used to predict sales and prevent churn, to see whether customers are being lost. The team is able to generate quite a lot of useful information from the data, and I even challenged Eivind on this once, because it is possible to do something about poor data quality, and they can actually do a lot of the data cleansing there as well.

And the way it works is that you and your sales department need to ask yourselves the fundamental question: What information do you need to run the company? Then we can prepare the data foundation for you. And there is another very exciting aspect here: Once the data foundation is in place, you have already laid much of the groundwork needed to start using it.

Artificial intelligence, for example. CoPilot can then use the same data foundation for whatever you may need it for. And then we came to the reports themselves, and you have also been able to create a report.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, so Power BI has three parts: one is the Power BI website that we have looked at together. But there is also Power BI Desktop and Power BI Mobile.

So Power BI Desktop is the tool I use to build these reports. Here on the Power BI website, it was possible to make some minor adjustments, and we saw the filtering options on the right-hand side, where you can create filters and so on. But it is very limited. In the desktop version, however, I can change everything.

Frode Stenstrøm: Yes, you can change everything.

Yuliaa Kamkova: And what I want—and adjust what you want to see afterwards in Power BI Desktop. So first, you build reports in Power BI Desktop, and then you publish them to your workspace on the Power BI website.

Frode Stenstrøm: And if you have Power BI reports that you currently use, but perhaps they don't look that good, please feel free to contact us, and we can help you make them communicate more effectively.

Ultimately, this is about creating reports that communicate effectively and can be used by most people without any additional training. Another great thing is that if, for example, we prepare the data foundation for you, you can use Power BI to create your own ad hoc reports based on the same data.

But the important thing is to work from a single data source so that, regardless of which report is created, everyone sees the same figures. If people do not see and trust the same figures, the reports will not be used. The final point concerns how they are used within the organization. And I can see that one of the success factors here has been that when a management team starts its Monday meeting by looking at Power BI to see how operations have performed and how they are expected to develop, and then uses those figures, it becomes very, very effective in ensuring that those who provide input to the data do so diligently, because the data is actually being used and reviewed.

There is also a positive side to this. It is not really so much about control, but rather that each salesperson’s work and results are made visible to the wider organization. This also means that more employees are seen and acknowledged. I can now see that our Power BI reports are used by the management team, the team leaders, and sales management, and as I mentioned earlier, they give us a basis for assessing whether we are working in the right way, whether we are creating value, whether we are delivering good service to our customers, and, not least, how our employees are doing.

So a great deal of this is about organizational development, because you can create a Power BI report quickly, but the report itself is not what matters. What matters is how the report is used and how the figures are actually used to support decision-making. We also cover this in one of our podcast episodes, where our colleagues Eivind and Per Kveim discuss how to measure input factors in order to manage the business. After all, last week's revenue is already in the past. But what changes need to be made in the organization to achieve higher revenue?

So there is a great deal involved in all of this that has nothing to do with technology. We come in and help with everything, but it is important that you and your team think about how the reports will be used. And as I said, all of this is built in Fabric. Take a look at our YouTube channel, where you will find a video explaining Microsoft Fabric as a product. Today, we have focused a little more on the reports themselves.

And then I'll take a quick look at ... So we're basically done. We actually are ... If I do this and this, and this, then we're actually done with today's webinar.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes. Did we get any questions?

Frode Stenstrøm: No, that question will probably come up too. Feel free to post them as comments in the comment section below on YouTube. So, what have we looked at today?

We've gone through the sample reports.

Yuliaa Kamkova: Yes, we went through ... three sales reports live, as well as three that were screenshots, but both were equally interesting and could be useful. So we talked a little about what could be achieved with these reports, or with the reports you would like us to build for you. Yes, and we also talked a little about how to build these reports.

So what is the reason, and what tools can we use to build them?

Frode Stenstrøm: And with that, we have reached the end of today's webinar. We have shown you a few examples. We will continue to create more webinars in which we look at other reports for departments besides sales. And if there is interest, we can also create a webinar that goes into a little more technical depth on how to create reports that communicate effectively and make them look like company reports rather than something you have simply downloaded from the internet.

And with those words, thank you, Yuliia, for your contribution to today's broadcast. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment on YouTube. If you'd like more professional insights, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you enjoyed it, please click like and share the broadcast with others. This broadcast is available on our YouTube channel as well as on the website ProsessPilotene.no.

The broadcast is produced by ProsessPilotene, which increases the value of your customers through the use of Microsoft technology. Our analytics team, including Julie here, can create data warehouses, reports, artificial intelligence forecasting models, and more. Our collaboration team can also help you create effective websites, customer clubs, portals, mobile applications, and everything else surrounding a robust CRM platform such as Dynamics.

Stay tuned next week for even more information from us. I, Frode Stenstrøm, have been responsible for producing this episode. The project manager is Oddbjørg Berge, with the aim of improving work processes for everyone—see you again.

In this webinar, you will see examples of useful reports:
- Status of leads and ongoing sales processes
- Revenue based on sales opportunities
- Weighted revenue per period
- Sales representatives and sales activities

Are you new to Dynamics 365 Sales? Watch the introduction first. In this webinar, we take a more in-depth look at how sales representatives can use Sales effectively in their day-to-day work.