I've run several meetings in my time. In general, I see meetings falling into a few buckets: status/connect meetings, working meetings, and informational meetings. Status/Connect meetings are designed to provide a session where a team can come together and share information and status updates as to current work completed, planned, and working. Working meetings are designed to allow a team to produce a defined product. Informational meetings are meant to disseminate information to a wide audience. Each of these types of meetings can be run from a Salesforce Dashboard.
But what if your boss is old school? Still printing reports? Still showing an Excel Spreadsheet or a PowerPoint slide? How can you convince your boss to move away from these antiquated tools of the meeting and onto running your meetings from a Salesforce Dashboard?
#1 - Build in components that matter to the attendees
Let's say we are in a Sales Status Meeting. What components should we include in a Sales Status Meeting Dashboard? Certainly a total pipeline, YTD quota obtainment, or even a top deals component. But those are components for the manager and hold little value to the attendees.
What's more valuable are components that impact the behavior of the meeting attendees. For example, in a Sales Status Meeting a behavior impacting report is an individual Sales Rep % Quarterly Quote obtainment report. This puts the team in competition with one another and allows the manager to identify high and low performers. Additionally, components that allow meeting attendees to see how close they are to a particular bonus level or anything related to their direct compensation is going to provide motivation as well. Anything that motivates your team will motivate your boss.
#2 - Data is always up to date
Dashboards have the benefit of always being accurate. PowerPoints, Spreadsheets, and any other non-cloud based tool have the add bonus of always being out of date. Its just not something you want to run meetings off of because you're always talking about inaccurate information.
Bring up past examples to your boss when a poor decision was made or bad information was disseminated because the information wasn't accurate. That will show how much better running a meeting from an accurate Dashboard is.
#3 - Live it
If you want your boss to use a dashboard to run their meetings then you need to use Dashboards to run your meetings and your day to day. You need to live it. Make yourself a dashboard with components that trigger action for you. Think of the components that motivate you or your team. For instance, I run a Customer Support Team. I add components on my dashboard such as the total breakdown, by percentage, of cases closed by individual team members so each team member can see what they are contributing to the total.
