Reports, tags and workflow automations | Office hours recap August 17 2023

Thanks to everyone who joined our office hours session on Thursday! We had a great session with a great group. Here’s a rundown of what we talked about:

How do I get a chart showing my lead conversions by month?

This is tricky to explain over text, so I created a video.

(The audio's a bit low, but you can turn on captions)

Note that this example is cohorted by the month that the Lead was created. So reading the chart left to right, I can see that in May 2021, we created 254 Leads. Of those 254, 63 have been converted.

My Dashboard has a KPI called “Opp Win Rate %.” What does it mean?

The KPI called Opp Win Rate % takes the number of Opportunities that are Won and divides it by the total number of Opportunities. So if you have 100 total Opportunities in Copper, and it shows you 12%, that means 12 of those 100 Opportunities have been marked as Won.

Just keep in mind this KPI is affected by any filters you have on your Dashboard. And actually, I recommend customizing the filters to get the most out of the metric. If you're working with multiple Pipelines, consider filtering by Pipeline. Or if you have a wide date range, consider narrowing that down.

Are tags a good way to report on events?

Tags are a balance of flexibility and structure for data that has a changing set of options. In the case of events, the list changes over time, and you might not be able to maintain a standard dropdown list. So they can be a great option because you don’t need an admin to edit the dropdown list every time a new event is added.

The ease of adding new options is also the downside of tags. Anyone can create a tag, so you might end up with multiple tags that refer to the same event. I recommend setting naming conventions for the event tags that you add. For example, if it’s an annual event, are you including the year as part of the tag? Should you use the full event name only, or are acronyms ok? Making those decisions upfront will save you some data wrangling later on.

Once your team is tagging things, you can use those tags to build reports. Most often I see folks using tags as filter criteria on their reports. But depending on how you set it up, they can also be included as a piece of data in a table in an Insight. Just keep in mind, an Insight looks at tags in the context of a specific record type. So in one Insight, you can show tags on Opportunities, or tags on Companies, or tags on People.

My Workflow Automation creates a Task from an Opportunity. How can I include the Opp’s name in the Task’s name?

If you want the Task name to be exactly the same as the triggering Opportunity's name, you can use the variable name, like this:

You can also combine name with another piece of text to make a more detailed title. To do this, use the CONCAT(,) function with the name variable. Here's an example where workflow automation will create a Task called "Follow up with [insert Opportunity name here]"

The full formula here is CONCAT("Follow up with ",name)

A full list of Workflow Automation variables and functions is available here. And if you ever want a hand with your formula, feel free to post in our forum or join one of my weekly office hours sessions.

Can Workflow Automation change a Tasks’ activity type?

Yes, Workflow Automation can change the Activity Type that is assigned to a Task. If you’re using Workflow Automation to create the Task in the first place, I recommend specifying the Activity Type in the Action. Here’s an example:

You can also do this with a Task that’s already been created. For example, you or a teammate might create a Task called “Schedule a meeting with the client.” Workflow Automation can check for the keyword “meeting” in the Task name and update the Activity Type to Meeting.

Remember to always Save and then turn on your Workflow Automation rules!

Everyone who joined our session got a link to the call recording, as well as a personalized follow up email. Hope to see you next time!