Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By : Steve Ivie
Book Image

Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI

By: Steve Ivie

Overview of this book

<p>Dynamics CRM 2015 holds a wealth of information about customers and the sales pipeline, but sometimes leaves users with basic end-user reporting and dashboard options. Power BI is a great new tool for analyzing and presenting data, giving us the ability to dig deeper into the information. With the increased requests for real-time sales analytics, Power BI when connected to Dynamics CRM offers a self-service approach to build, shape, and present data through an easy-to-use interface. The set of features within Power BI will give all users a tool to generate real-time sales productivity reports and dashboards to enhance their sales performance.</p> <p>This book will provide you with the skills you need to learn how to build and present Dynamics CRM 2015 sales dashboards using Power BI. It follows a step-by-step process to build an interactive dashboard by organizing and consolidating datasets, improving the look and feel of graphs, charts, and maps, and enhancing data clarity with filters and slicers.</p> <p>By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will learn how to use the Power BI Q/A functionality to query data in the dashboard, extend the dashboards to the mobile apps for the iPad and Surface, and leverage the pre-built workbook template provided by Microsoft for Dynamic CRM 2015 sales, service, and marketing dashboards.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building Dynamics CRM 2015 Dashboards with Power BI
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Cards


Usually, seeing your sales data in the flat format is all you need to be productive. Out of the box, Power BI provides a basic card visualization option, which does just what it says. For a majority of salespersons, it is a very effective way to just see your data.

For our sales productivity dashboard, we need to display Estimated Revenue and Customer with Number of Days the Deal is Open in a single card. Adding customer revenue cards can help sales see a simple view of the top customer and potential sales to help with most important deals:

Customer Card with Number of Days Deal is Open

To get started, we need to add a new report with a Card type to show customer cards with the sales pipeline information with Days Open.

Here is how it is done:

  1. Add a new page to your report for Cards, navigate to the top main menu, and select New Page.

  2. Navigate to the Fields and Filters area on the left-hand side of the form window and select City, State, Customer, Days Open, Name, Salesperson, Practice...