Lab5 Uses Axy OKR by Axy7 to Streamline OKR management in Salesforce

Lab5
3 min readJun 1, 2021

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At the core of most organizations, there are big dreams and big goals. No matter your sector or expertise, goal-setting cuts to the heart of the work you do each day.

This year, Lab5 set off on a mission to make goal-setting a vital component of our company culture. That’s why we partnered with Axy7 — to make sure we’re keeping our eyes on the prize and sharing this expertise with our clients.

Performance goals aren’t something an organization should haphazardly think about a few times a quarter; they should drive team action and guide each day’s priorities. Since integrating data from your favorite apps to Salesforce has become much easier and faster, there’s never been a better time to level your team’s goal-management. You could be one simple integration away from managing OKR directly inside Salesforce. Here’s how we’re doing it.

Photo credit: Markus Winkler

A Quick OKR 101

The acronym “OKR” stands for “Objectives and Key Results.” It’s a popular goal management framework that helps companies implement and execute quarterly strategy. There’s a lot that’s been written about how to set OKR, so we won’t cover it here (you can read more about them from the person who brought them to Google in the 1990s).

One important thing to remember is that the OKR framework was designed to provide objectivity around goal-setting. At the end of the quarter, it should be easy to look at your OKR and see where your team has succeeded and where it has fallen short. A good objective and regularly-monitored key results help provide clarity and direction to your team’s work.

Building Alignment Through OKR

Goal setting frameworks such as OKR help to build alignment between your overarching company goals, the objectives of smaller teams, and the objectives of individuals. This ensures that contributors at all levels feel ownership of the company strategy and understand how their work fits into the bigger picture. It also helps your teams to block out noise or stop work on efforts that don’t directly support company objectives.

Why Managing OKR in Salesforce Makes Sense

If your company is like most, your Salesforce instance is one of the main places you track the work your team does each day. From marketing teams, to sales, to service– many of your employees spend their entire days in the CRM. Sales teams, for example, are probably already measured on pipeline goals or the activities they log, while service teams might be accountable to customer satisfaction or first-call resolution metrics.

Axy OKR allows you to link the Salesforce reports you already use for measuring your team’s performance directly to key results. This means that you can track progress toward your objectives every day, in real time, and at every level of your organization. This real-time visibility equips your leadership team with tools to help support key results that are running behind or adjust expectations when objective achievement is at risk.

And even the parts of your organization that don’t work in Salesforce regularly can track their objectives’ progress through Axy OKR. Simple integrations to pull in data from third-party cloud or on-premise systems can be effortlessly implemented to link concrete measurements to these teams’ key results.

Stay Tuned for More

In the next couple of weeks, Lab5 will be posting more about how we have implemented Axy OKR internally, how we’re pulling data into Salesforce to help us measure our key results, and how we hope to share this expertise with our clients.

If your team would like to talk about managing OKR in Salesforce, get in touch with us!

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Lab5

Lab5 works with companies around the world to make their CRM programs successful and their employees’ jobs easier.