In a closely interconnected world, the value of information has gone up exponentially. In business, it can be – and often is – the difference between success and failure. Sound Business Intelligence is an important undertaking for any company that intends to stay competitive. You want to know what clients need, what your competition is doing, and have reliable information about the market and industry you are operating in at all times. This is where a platform like Salesforce Analytics Cloud (sometimes called Salesforce Wave Analytics) comes in. Let’s take a look at the Salesforce Analytics platform, what it does, and what benefits it brings.
What is Salesforce Analytics (Salesforce Wave Analytics)?
Salesforce Analytics is a platform designed to give you the ability to generate insights from large amounts of data. It enables you to visualize large and sometimes complex datasets without necessarily having the technical skills required for advanced data analysis. This visualization of this information can be personalized so that it is presented in a way that is immediately useful to you – whether you want to see the big picture, or drill into the finer details.
Additionally, Analytics connects seamlessly with other modules in the Salesforce platform, to give you access to datasets from other business operations and further enrich the amount of data informing your decision-making.
Salesforce Analytics also comes with the benefits of most cloud-based applications. It’s easily accessible for mobile devices, so your field staff can carry business insights with them wherever they go.
Why Your Business Needs Salesforce Analytics
Crucial Business Intelligence
The value of Salesforce Analytics is essentially that of good Business Intelligence. Having data to assist in decision-making means you can run your operations at a lower cost. You are armed with an understanding of how to optimize processes in relation to the data you are getting. This results in improved efficiency across the board, which translates into time, resource, and cost saving.
Better Decision-Making
Analytics also helps you improve the decision-making process itself. If you have timely data, forecasts and the information needed to compare different courses of action, coming to a decision is that much easier, and, perhaps more importantly, the likelihood of making the wrong choice is vastly reduced.
Better Innovation
The most successful businesses do the best job of satisfying their clients’ needs. In order to do that, however, you need to be well-informed of what your customers want. Even when you successfully deliver, it is important to stay in tune with what your market demands and innovate accordingly. So having a platform like Analytics will help come up with better products and services and continuously innovate. This ensures you always keep your clients happy and the competition at bay.
How is Analytics Cloud Better than Basic Reports & Dashboards?
It is true that not all businesses will require the Analytics Cloud, however, the limitations of Salesforce Reports & Dashboards are also quite apparent.
Yes, R&D is great for quickly seeing operational data in real time to obtain an overview of what’s going on in your CRM. Yet, it might be difficult to find trends in excessively big data sets. R&D can handle a fair amount of data processing, but it is clearly not designed to handle millions of rows. Analytics Cloud, on the other hand, can do just that – process massive amounts of data.
When you realize that Analytics Cloud can handle data from external systems as well, speed and processing power become even more evident. It can pull information from your Salesforce CRM, ETL, CSV upload, and, of course, iOS devices.
Key Features of Salesforce Analytics (Salesforce Wave Analytics)
Aggregated Data
Data from multiple sources is combined into one single view, making it easier to draw more informed conclusions and generate more accurate insights.
Mobile Friendliness
This is a crucial feature as it enables users to access fresh data and insights on the go. So sales reps and service staff are always equipped to make the best decisions possible. Users can personalize their views, filter and categorize data as necessary, wherever they may be. Updates are reflected in real-time for other users who may also be relying on this information.
Self-Service Access
Users can find answers to their questions with the help of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud without submitting support tickets to the IT team. On top of that, they’re not required to have any data analytics background nor they have to wait for any extended period of time for solutions.
You can also pose ad hoc queries to Salesforce Analytics Cloud to deeper explore and understand your data. There will be visible, real-time updates, and you can use filters and grouping techniques for further breakdowns.
Business Intelligence
Analytics Cloud offers strong reporting and business intelligence capabilities. Select your KPIs and allow the system to analyze the data to provide smart forecasts, strategic planning advice and budgeting recommendations. It also highlights relevant trends and notifies about certain problems that may need addressing, if there are any.
Statistical Analysis
Analytics Cloud does analysis better than virtually any similar platform and does it in many ways. Regression analysis, multivariate analysis, statistical simulation, association discovery are just to name a few amongst the analysis features provided by the solution.
Visualization
Dashboards can be adapted to show the information a user needs. This makes the whole experience that much more user-friendly so that decision-makers can focus on doing their jobs, instead of trying to manage data at the same time.
Collaboration
Not only can users easily access real-time data from other departments, the application also enables users to cast dashboards to other screens to further enhance teamwork and collaboration.
Extendability
Building additional functionality onto Salesforce Analytics Cloud is fairly uncomplicated. This means there are many Third Party solutions that you can use to further enhance the way you work with the platform.
Security
One of the benefits of cloud-based solutions is the enhanced security that they offer. You get the benefit of enhanced security using Salesforce’s architecture
Technical Details
| Device Support: | Windows, Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Web browsers |
| Languages: | English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish |
| Deployment: | Local servers, cloud-based |
| Pricing options: | Monthly subscription, annual subscription, quote-based |
| Organization sizes: | Medium to large enterprises |
Benefits of Implementing Salesforce Analytics
Improved Efficiency
All your staff stand to benefit from being able to see the overall workings of your operations across the entire pipeline. There is better cohesion between departments, data is synchronized, and the quality and speed of decision-making is greatly improved.
Whitespace Analysis
With better business intelligence, your business can more easily identify areas that can be used for revenue growth. You have better visibility of your products and customers, and can see any gaps much more quickly and easily.
Accurate Forecasting
Reporting in business need not be purely historical. Being proactive gives businesses the upper hand over competitors and gives them the opportunity to put their best foot forward when new opportunities arise. It also enables them to tweak their operations so that they are not wasting resources and constantly functioning optimally
Pipeline Management
A better view of your sales pipeline means you can immediately identify opportunities and inefficiencies in the way your company is going about its business. You can easily make comparisons with historical data, and use that to choose the right course of action for future opportunities.
Salesforce Analytics (Salesforce Wave Analytics) Pricing
Salesforce Analytics pricing is dependent on what configuration of modules you choose. It could be deployed, for example, as part of the Tableau CRM Pricing in the CRM Growth or Plus tiers. In which case the subscription would be from €125 per user per month for Growth, and €150 for Plus.
Salesforce Analytics Platform Pre-Implementation Steps
In order to make sure you get the best out of your solution, preparation is absolutely key. You’ll want to ensure you understand Salesforce’s Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Einstein products as they will be key to getting you the insights you need.
In addition, your staff should have some working knowledge of analytics techniques like propensity analyses, predictive modeling. You should also understand the concepts of machine learning, and artificial intelligence to be in the best position to make the most of the Einstein tool.
Other than that, simply ensure you have clear objectives, whether it is for sales, marketing, customer service, or whatever aspects of your business you deem necessary. This will help you during the implementation to ensure that your set-up is tuned to deliver your requirements.
READ ALSO: The Complete Salesforce Implementation Guide.
Conclusion
Salesforce Analytics is an extremely potent asset to have in your business strategy. It gives your organization eyes and ears and enables your strategy to be agile and respond quickly to changes on the ground. Giving your business the ability to proactively strategize and when changes occur, to think on its feet is an extremely vital asset to have.
Don’t hesitate to contact a Salesforce integration service provider to help you understand your needs and develop the platform to suit them if you want to make the most of it. From initial analysis, configuring and adapting the platform to match your organization’s requirements, custom development if necessary, to maintenance and end-user training, OMI can work with you to give your business a boost.