CRM 2011 Product Unit Sales Goals

A revenue goal is probably the most common example of a sales goal, but it’s certainly not the only way you might define a goal. Another option is to define a goal for the number of product units. There is a default goal metric you can use in Dynamics CRM goal management to define product unit sales goals, assuming you have configured the product catalog and are using opportunity products (”line items”) combined with system-calculated pricing.

For this example, I’ll minimize setup requirements and work with the simplest version of the product catalog I can think of. Two unimaginatively named products, each as price list items in one price list. Here are the products:

And here they are as price list items:

To build a quarterly sales goal for product units, follow these steps:

1. On the site map, click Sales and then click Goals.
2. In the Records section of the ribbon, click New.
3. In the Name field, type Q1 Product Goal for <User>
4. In the Goal Owner field, enter the user to which the goal will be assigned, or locate the user in the lookup dialog.
5. Use the Manager field to identify the goal owner’s manager.
6. Click the lookup control on the Goal Metric field, and select No. of Product Units in the Look Up Record dialog, then click OK.
7. In the Target field, enter the target value for the goal. I’ll enter a nice round number like 1,000 in this example.
8. Click the Save button on the ribbon. The goal form should look like the following figure:

   

The goal is now defined, but a product goal like this one is different enough from the previous revenue goal to warrant further discussion.

Notice that the Target field now has a data type of Decimal, rather than the Money data type in the revenue goal example. This is determined by the different Goal Metric selected for this goal, No. of Product Units. That goal metric uses the Opportunity Product entity as the source record type for its rollup fields. You can see that by examining the following figure, which is the Goal Metric form for this goal metric:

Let’s drill down slightly further and examine the form for the actualdecimal rollup field. It’s highlighted in the previous figure, and if you double-click it to open the form you’ll see the following figure:

For the current example, here are two of the two most interesting points to take away from the definition of the goal metric and the rollup fields:

• The Rollup Field specifies Opportunity Product as the source record type, and the Quantity field as the Source Field.
• But notice that in Step 3, a different record type, Opportunity, is used to specify the period the records will roll up into. Because opportunity product is a child record of opportunity, when you close as won an opportunity containing line items with a specific product, a rollup field defined like this will cause the products sold within that opportunity to be participating records in the goal.

Let’s walk through the recalculation of this new product goal. With the data set I used for this example, after selecting the new product goal on the grid and recalculating it, I get the following:

Why are the actual and in-progress values both zero for the product goal even though they’re both positive for the revenue goal? This is because none of my opportunity records use line items and opportunity products: they all have the User Provided option specified as the opportunity record’s Revenue option, as the following figure illustrates:

To gain insight into how a product goal works, follow these steps to make several opportunity records use System Calculated pricing:

1. Open an opportunity record and select the System Calculated option in the Revenue field.
2. In the Line Items section, select a price list in the Price List lookup field.
3. Then add one or more opportunity products in the Line Items section, making sure to select them from the Existing Products. In my example, these are the products previously added as price list items.
4. After doing that, save the opportunity record and click the Recalculate Opportunity button on the ribbon.

For example, after modifying a couple of opportunity records to use line items and then recalculating the goal, I see the following, with what appears to be a number of product units in the In-Progress field:

When I open the goal record and examine the In-Progress (Decimal) list, I see this:

This should make it more obvious that it’s the Quantity field from opportunity product that’s rolling up to the calculated In-Progress field, and that is how you create a goal for number of products sold rather than revenue.

OK, so now we’ve got goals in terms of product units and it’s time to visualize our goal progress. You create a custom view of goals displaying only those based on the No. of Product Units metric and open the chart pane. To your horror, you discover there are no charts available by default for your goal:

Besides the Percentage Achieved chart, the only charts available are for Count and Money data types, neither of which work for the Decimal data type our goal metric gives us. In another article I’ll show you how to export one of the default charts, tweak it, and re-import it to work with the decimal data type…but this article’s long enough already!