A quick way to get into trouble in a company that uses Salesforce is to try and use the default reports to draw your conclusions.
Default reports are easy to access. They’re familiar. But they’re almost always not the true story. And looking to them for answers is likely to only lead you astray. The reason is simple: most companies are a lot more complicated than a default report can account for.
There’s data from different teams that are measured differently. There’s legacy processes. There’s filtering to consider. Bottom line, a default report is an easy way to see some numbers, but rarely is it showing the right ones.
Which is why I’m so surprised most companies don’t just disable the default reports entirely. Maybe Salesforce doesn’t allow it. Or maybe it’s because doing so means that someone is now on the hook to provide the “right” data.
Maybe it’s a bit of column A and column B. But it’s worth the effort to try and restrict these reports (or at least discourage their use), because the time saved by ignoring the issue is increasingly outweighed by the harm caused by arming people with bad or misleading data.
The more time I spend in these tools, the more I recognize the need for dedicated analysis & data functions across departments. We just can’t hope to continue using data effectively with only the bare minimum provided by the default tools. The story has gotten too complex, and we’re doing it a disservice by trying to take a shortcut.