Top 5 Embedded Analytics For Your Salesforce Instance

May 29, 2014

The desires of most salesforce.com customers can be condensed into a single overarching need: the ability to easily access key information that's in real-time. This is generally referred to as “embedded analytics,” or integrated analytics and capabilities in business applications that help users work more efficiently by providing task-specific relevant information. Detailed below are my top five to consider adding to your Salesforce instance.

  1. Sales History
    How are sales doing this year compared to last year? How is the win to loss ratio trending? These are both important elements of a good sales history dashboard, enabling you to quickly identify opportunities or risks that influence how and from whom revenue comes.
  2. Complete Account & Contact Profiles
    Expand account and contact records to include everything relevant about the customer. Previous purchases, who ultimately approves contracts, and other products or services the customer has expressed interest in are all good examples. Context, often so crucial to closing deals or handing off accounts, is lost in activity records, opportunities, and sales history. 
  3. Activity Tracking
    Do sales managers and sales reps know which activities they should be working on, which they’ve completed, and whether they’re performing said activities with the frequency needed to hit their respective quotas? Whether it’s a metric such as last emailed date and number of calls, or something more specific like number of demos, it is important for all users to get a summary of all the activity information they’ve put into Salesforce. Without a summary, the information is usually buried in Salesforce without monitoring capability.
  4. Upselling Information
    It is easier to increase revenue by delivering more value to existing customers than acquiring new ones. Knowing what existing customers are buying, and what they need to buy is critical. Ask yourself: do you have a flag, or multiple flags, on your account page to show you who your best customers are?
  5. Idea Management
    Are you capturing ideas from your customers, both online and offline, and aligning those ideas to their account or contact records in Salesforce? If you do, great. If you don’t, start practicing this today — your marketing or product development team will thank you for this down the road, when they need to make tough decisions on what to build, or what message to deliver next.

Once you find the best source of this information in Salesforce, oftentimes you'll have to create custom fields and rollups of the information in order to present it at appropriate levels of detail. For instance, do you want to track actual sales by product, by month, by account, or by a sales rep? The answer is likely all of the above. The AppExchange app Rollup Helper enables this.

Rollup Helper helps Bluewolf consultants to easily rollup any information with clicks, not code. You can quickly create any type of rollup field in Salesforce, including:

  • Counts of Record Values
  • Single or Multi-Text Rollups 
  • Sums of Record Values
  • Maximum Value
  • Minimum Value
  • Average Value

With Rollup Helper, you can acheive actionable, real-time data for your business process, as you’ll have the ability to access key information in real-time, as you are using Salesforce. Interested to see how leading companies use Salesforce? Check out Bluewolf's annual State of Salesforce report to learn more.

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