Increasing numbers of sales teams are using Jira for sales management. Our partner Deviniti uses Jira Software as its customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and there are some great features and templates for sales teams in Jira Work Management. That said, many sales teams stick with tried and true CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Hubspot, rather than Jira.
The sales team, perhaps more than any other, is the one that needs to know what’s going on in the rest of the organization. If they’re selling a product, they need to know what the product team are doing. If they’re selling a service, they need to know what the service management team are doing. And with customers these days buying so many products as a service, they need to work closely with both. They’ll want eyes on the marketing team, too, who will be working on campaigns and materials that the sales team need, and the HR team when hiring new salespeople.
The product team is most likely to be working in Jira Software on bug fixes, new features, and new releases. The service management/support team is likely to be working in Jira Service Management on request fulfillment, maintenance, and implementation projects. The marketing and HR teams could be working in Jira Software or Jira Work Management on campaigns and recruitment. And the best way of communicating all these teams’ progress is through Jira reports.
The problem is, if the sales team aren’t working in Jira, how can they see Jira reports? Easy. By looking at them in Confluence.
How sales can get eyes on Jira… in Confluence
The sales team are probably using Confluence in the way all the teams in your organization are using Confluence: it’s the company intranet and quite often a digital substitute for the office in these remote, globally distributed times. The sales team may also use Confluence to produce sales materials or make and manage sales contracts.
But what the sales team might not know is that they can also use Confluence for reporting on Jira data. The fact that Jira and Confluence are both Atlassian products means they’re easily integrated, and Confluence comes with a Jira charts macro that lets you make a (small) handful of charts and graphs on a Confluence page. If your Jira and Confluence cloud instances have the same URL, you can also add a bunch of other preconfigured reports, e.g. sprint health and sprint burndown.
Unfortunately the native capabilities are basically useless if the sales team don’t have access to Jira (which, if they’re not working in it, they probably don’t). The out-of-the-box charts will simply be blank when the sales team view the page.
With the Atlassian Marketplace app Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, this problem is no longer. Custom Charts is a macro that lets you load Jira reports onto a Confluence page using a Jira user’s permissions; this allows the sales team to see what the Jira teams are up to without having to set foot in Jira.
Moreover, Custom Jira Charts for Confluence comes with tons more visualization options, from different charts to different colors and labels. You can’t do much of anything with the native reports apart from, urm, change the width. But with Custom Charts you could make a 2D stacked bar chart that’s colored, ordered, and labeled however you want.
Here are 2 examples of Jira reports that you could make that your sales team would find useful.
1. At Risk Issues By Customer
In this Custom Charts 2D Grouped Bar Chart, we’re pulling in at-risk issues from our Sales project. The team flags Jira issues that indicate any dissatisfaction the customer has shared around our services, so we are using the Jira field, “Flagged”, in the Group by dropdown. The Chart By dropdown is set to a custom field the team uses to track the customer. You can see that over half of the Flagged issues (54%) were submitted by Stark Industries, which could mean that this customer is unhappy and at risk of finding another solution. Knowing this, the sales team can prioritize Stark Industries in order to improve the relationship.
2. Features To Be Released This Month
The Custom Charts Issue List below is displaying features the development team plans to release in the current month. In the Source dropdown, we have selected Advanced (JQL), which enables us to display issues using Jira Query Language (JQL). JQL is a flexible text-based search language that lets you find exactly what you’re looking for quickly.
Here, we want to pull in Features with a Release Date in the current month, so we enter the following statement into the box to the right of the Source dropdown:
due < endOfMonth() AND issuetype =Feature
The sales team can use this as a guide when talking to existing and potential customers about future of the product. For example, some exciting updates are coming out regarding integrations with popular messaging applications. Maybe a potential customer was on the fence about purchasing our app because it didn’t work with Slack. The sales team can share the news about the upcoming Slack integration, increasing the chances of a sale.
For more information about Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, and how your sales team can get better insights on what your Jira teams are up to, get in touch. You can also try Custom Charts in our interactive reporting playground.
Christopher is a self-confessed nerd who’d probably take the cake on Mastermind if Star Trek: Voyager was his specialist subject. He writes fiction about time travel, conspiracies and aliens; loves roller coasters, hiking and Christmas; and hates carpet, rom-coms and anything with chilli in it. He’s written extensively for technology companies and Atlassian partners and specializes in translating complicated technical concepts, specs and jargon into readable, benefits-driven copy that casual readers will understand.