Welcome to the next instalment in my series looking at revision topics for the MB2-713 certification. (Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Sales)

In this post I am going to look at goals.

A goal is simply a target that you wish to measure performance against. Thinking specifically about the sales, example goals might include the value of won opportunities or the number of new leads. Sales targets (goals) can be defined for each sales person and rolled into a larger parent goal covering a sales territory or business sector.

When monitoring goals, we look at in progress and actual values. In terms of sales, in progress might be defined as the estimated revenue from open opportunities whilst actual might reflect the revenue gained from won opportunities.

A goal is made of several parts

• Goal metric, a numeric value you wish to measure from a specific record type. Some metrics come predefined but others can be added as required. (Revenue for example is a preconfigured goal metric type.)
• Goal target and Goal Period, a target is the value for a specific goal metric to be achieved in a defined period. Actual and in progress values are calculated and compared against the goal target.
• Goal owner, each goal is owned by an individual or team.
• Parent Goals, these are used to arrogate child goals into one larger goal.
• Rollup Queries, are used to define how actual and in progress amounts are rolled up against the goal.

Goals can be created and maintained from either the Sales or Service areas of CRM. This is because goals connected with service can be just as important as those connected with sales. Actually goals can be related to any system or custom entity.

Goal Metric – Allows a user to define how a goal is measured. For example: counting the number of leads, revenue etc. The CRM solution comes with a number of out of the box goal metrics but you can also define others. Rollup fields form part of the goal metric, these contain the calculated fields that are used to derive the actual and in-progress values. When defining the in-progress and actual fields, the user not only says how the field will be calculated but also decides on which date the field will apply. For example: in-progress opportunities might get counted based on their estimated close date but actual revenue will get counted based on date the opportunity was won.

Goal Target – The target is simply what you’re shooting for. For example: To sell £100k of a given product per quarter. A goal target is measured against actual and in-progress values. The actual target might be to sell £100k between Jan and March, the in-progress figure would reflect the value of opportunities likely to close between Jan and March. All goals must have a target value.

Goal Owner – Every goal is tied to a user or team that owns the goal.

Parent Goals – A parent goal is used to group goals. A manager might (for example) have twenty direct reports. Each of these people would have a goal that they own. But all are grouped under the parent goal to see how the group collectively performs. Meaning the parent role becomes an aggregated version of the child goals.

Goal Period – All goals are time bound, whenever a goal is created you need to identify the time period it will “run” for. E.g. Week, month, year or a fiscal period. Fiscal periods, each goal can be linked to a fiscal period. If a fiscal period is selected you must select the year, linking the goal to a specific period in time. Fiscal periods might refer to a year that starts on a different basis, for example for many companies their fiscal year runs April to March. So period 1 is April. (Rather than January!) Alternatively, a custom period can be entered, for this the user must enter a specific start and end date.

Each Goal will have goal criteria, defined on the goal form;

Roll Up Only from Child Goals – This option may often be used on a parent goal when you want the goal to simply be an aggregate from all of the child goals. For example: Each sales person might have an individual goal. The parent goal may then simply be a sum of all the sales people that work in a given territory / team.

Record set for Rollup – Typically each goal will represent cases, sales, etc. that apply to an individual (or team) that owns the records. However, this option can be used to create an organization wide goal.

Rollup Queries – In some cases you’ll need to fine tune the data sets. For example: To only measure opportunities as in progress is they have a real potential of conversion. In this circumstance rollup queries are used to articulate the records to be counted. You can define and add rollup queries for in-progress and actual queries. A rollup query is essentially an advanced find used to further filter the data. It is important to notice that the entity type MUST be the same as the entity selected for the goal. The example below would only include opportunities with a high probability rating.

Calculating / Recalculating Goals

Goals will be automatically recalculated periodically throughout the day but users with correct permissions can also select the “Recalculate” button to force a calculation on demand. Sometimes useful when a new goal is first created as actual values will not be updated when the goal is first saved. (Unless you do a recalculate.)

Once the calculation has run automatically or by selecting the Recalculate button the actuals (and in-progress values) can be seen on the goal form.

Goal Charts

When viewing charts, you have a number of charts to represent goals.

Including;

• Percentage Achieved
  
• Goal Progress (Counts)
  
• Goal Progress (Money)
  
• Today’s Target Vs. Actuals (Count)
  
• Today’s Target Vs. Actuals (Money)
  

The “today’s target chart” derives a target based on where you should be at relative to your goal. In my example, I have a target of 100 by end of March but as I am at the end of Feb today’s target chart shows a lower value of 65.

Notice that on a goal progress chart there are four pieces of information represented;

• The ultimate target
  
• Today’s target
  
• The in-progress total
  
• The actual amount achieved
  

I hope you got all of that! Goals have quite a few concepts to remember for the MB2-713 exam. It is worth making sure you have some hands-on experience with these.

I hope you’ve found this post useful for your preparation.
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