Ways to Supercharge Salesforce.com Data with Sales Analytics

Transcription

1 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce.com Data with Sales Analytics

2 Layering powerful sales analytics applications on top of Salesforce data is transformative for sales leaders. It elevates the utility of Salesforce data to that of an actionable management tool, giving you the power to rocket your business past the competition. Here are 7 things you can do with supercharged Salesforce analytics: Lead in real time Don t live on assumptions. Know that your pipeline and forecast are accurate in real time. Learn from the past. Leverage historic data to make smarter decisions today. Eliminate IT hurdles. Go from math to magic with built-in functions and self-service access to real insight Tell the right story. From the CEO to Sales Ops, the right people need the right information to succeed. Give it to them. Get the facts right. Put the days of data exports behind you, banish data quality questions, and watch alignment happen. Be a storyteller. Use visualizations to add context and win over your peers. Know your customer. Get serious ninja skills by combining data sources for a complete end-to-end profile of your customer. 7 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 2

3 Introduction In just over a decade, salesforce.com has radically changed the way more than 100,000 businesses manage customer information. It stores all relevant information about individual customers: what they buy or don t; why they buy or don t; how they ve historically interacted with your sales team. Serving to collect data and streamline processes, Salesforce is remarkable. But, that s not what helps you close deals. Salesforce lacks the native ability to surface trends and anomalies that actually allow you to manage your team differently, take action in real-time, and learn from your customers entire journey. With arguably the world s most revolutionary cloud technology at your fingertips, you still haven t transitioned from the art of sales, to the science. The best business decisions are made with real-time access to factual data, combined with judgement and experience. According to a recent study by the MIT s Center for Digital Business, companies in the top third of their industry in their use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5% more productive and 6% more profitable than their competitors. Erik Brynjolfsson, the MIT economist who who conducted the study, told the New York Times, 5 percent increase in output and productivity is significant enough to separate winners from losers in most industries. Certainly Salesforce offers built-in reporting functionality that alleviates the pain of what was historically a manual process: Tracking total won business, total opportunities, opportunity amounts, stages and owners (you get the idea). And for years, administrators have tried to optimize Salesforce to maximize its functional benefits. They add custom objects and fields, enabling you to amass even more information about a customer: Why you won, referencability, etc. But here s the secret: It s not volume of information that makes for a great sales leader. It s actionable information. Because Salesforce is process-driven, or transactional, it s optimized to silo data. The system is built on objects, so there s no easy way to slice and dice objects and combine information in a way that delivers actionable insight in ad hoc ways. Well, that s not going to help you crush the competition. The world s most successful sales leaders know that the answers to these questions can be found with analytics. But at what cost? Extracting data to be manually processed by IT, only to answer a single question, days or weeks after it was asked? This paper explores 7 ways that sales analytics apps supercharge Salesforce data and skyrocket sales leaders to success -- all without messy Excel spreadsheets. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 3

4 The bottom line? No matter how well you optimize Salesforce, you will still have questions: What deals require the most executive focus? What will make or break our goals this quarter? Which reps are our top performers and why? What is the ideal customer profile? How and when has my pipeline changed since the beginning of the quarter? Where are the bottlenecks in the deal lifecycle? 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 4

5 Lead in real time. Don t hinge your quarterly numbers on instinct or assumptions. An accurate, real-time pipeline and forecast gives you the upper hand. The key to delivering value with BI is to take the data out of the subject matter expert s hands and put it into the business users hands in an actionable way. It s probably the most important thing you do, but just days into the quarter it s already inaccurate. Yep, we re talking about your sales forecast. SiriusDecisions recently reported that that only 21 percent of companies achieved 90 percent or greater levels of sales forecast accuracy at 30 days out. With budgets and bonuses dependent on this number, shouldn t you constantly monitor your pipeline and adjust your forecast in real-time? For most sales leaders, presenting a forecast based on real-time pipeline changes simply consumes too much time and resource. According to Sales Benchmark Index, 37 percent of sales management time is spent on forecasting sales. That means it s almost lunchtime before you re out of the reporting weeds. Using Salesforce to match up current progress against earlier predictions is a very manual hassle, and it s nearly impossible to extract insight on historical forecast accuracy. As a result, your forecast is an idle prediction. It can t iterate in real-time as new data influences its trajectory. But real-time sales analytics can instantly change the way you manage your forecast Supercharged forecasting and pipeline analysis allows you to: John Schaub, Hootsuite Monitor deals as they move between stages, or in and out of this quarter s pipeline View your total pipeline at any given time See the pace of deals as they move between stages Compare your current state with historic snapshots 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 5

6 Sounds great. But how does a real-time pipeline or forecast change the way you manage your team? Here are three ways: 1 Shift from reactive to proactive management. With a daily view of total pipeline by stage, you know exactly what activities to focus on, whether it s prioritizing demos and proof of concepts or preparing your legal department to help move contracts along. 2 Identify positive or negative trends and unearth their origin. Knowing the origin of pipeline trends helps you focus your coaching where it counts. Identify whether your team is qualifying deal stages appropriately, prioritizing new leads over follow-ups, effectively managing objections or delivering the right references for high-value opportunities. 3 Accurately communicate progress to your executives. The last thing your CEO or board of directors want at the quarterly business review is a surprise. Plus, you need to set yourself up for success in future quarters. An accurate pipeline and forecast allows you to clearly predict if you ll crush or miss your targets. That s the difference between asking for more budget and expanding your team, or working cross-functionally with product and marketing on strategic initiatives. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 6

7 Tell the Right Story. Don t hinge your quarterly numbers on instinct or assumptions. An accurate, real-time pipeline and forecast gives you the upper hand. The information executives seek has changed over the years. Gone are the days when CEOs want only to see bookings. This explains why you re hammered with questions about progress against targets and the likelihood of meeting goals. There s a huge advantage to giving your CEO that level of visibility, too. It empowers him or her to take strategic action with marketing, product, services, finance and support to help you win and retain customers. But you re no fool. If it were as easy as handing out Salesforce credentials you d already be doing it. Salesforce s built-in reporting isn t designed to easily deliver insight or provide transparency up and down the leadership stack. Salesforce reports and dashboards are generally structured for analysts or sales operations, providing details that don t offer context for CEOs and are not granular enough for regional VPs and sales reps. Still, there has to be a better way than hiring an analyst or three to spend hours creating custom reports. Sales analytics dashboards can transparently expose appropriate metrics for each level of the sales organization and ensure all team members can effectively deliver. Plus, transparency drives cultural change by eliminating politics and data obscurity. These dashboards can be embedded directly into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, or automatically issued as reports while still working from a shared version of facts. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 7

8 Here s our roundup of dashboards that top sales leaders use to run their organizations, share insight with executive leadership, and manage direct reports: The SVP or VP of Sales Bottom Line: Where should I focus my attention to help close big deals? Dashboard best practices: This dashboard should serve two purposes. First, it should give you the confidence and visibility to be a proactive leader. Second, it needs to keep you out of the weeds and focused on high-impact business activities. Essential reports: 1. Quota Progress and Win Rate: Projection on whether your sales organization will hit the quarter s quota, and the rate at which your team is winning opportunities 2. Top Opportunities: Ranking of opportunities by largest amount potential and by highest likelihood to close 3. Stalled Opportunities: Identifying opportunities that are considered stuck within the sales cycle and need attention 4. State of Pipeline: Illustrate the accuracy of your quarterly forecasts by highlighting forecast goal attainment and deal slippage The CEO Bottom Line: What is the overall outlook for the quarter/year? Dashboard best practices: There s a reason we call it the executive summary. The CEO needs a a red/yellow/green view of sales performance, so she can open the door to larger conversations on if, when and how she needs to get more involved. Essential reports: 1. Revenue contributions: Clear summary of key contributors to deals won during the quarter 2. Pipeline potential: Ability to evaluate whether there are enough opportunities in the pipeline to achieve the organization s sales goals Your direct reports, RVP/Divisional Sales Bottom Line: What products/ regions/reps are driving revenue in my region? Dashboard best practices: Give them the ability to get deep into their data. These dashboards are all about slicing, dicing and reporting across objects. If your direct reports can drill into how their teams are performing by rep, region, product, etc., they ll know which issues are high-impact and require executive focus. Essential reports: 1. Top products: Identify the winning products in your portfolio, and what makes them more successful than others 2. Top regions: Highlight areas with the highest demand and success 3. Top sales reps: Reward and coach your sales reps towards higher attainment 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 8

9 Learn from the past. Leverage historic data to turn art into a very repeatable science. Three KPIs that you should regularly examine with historical context: 1. Win rate 2. Stage velocity 3. Forecast accuracy If you ve ever tried to track how your team has performed period over period, you know it s the kind of project that requires lots of Redbull and late-night pizza delivery. Outside of holding two print-outs side by side and going to work with a highlighter, an analyst would need to manually map together reports from multiple periods. Even then, the output has a short shelf life and must be reproduced for future comparisons. These manual processes stand in the way of spotting trends and benchmarking performance over quarters, months and weeks. That s a shame, because benchmarks allow you to be much more effective as a leader. The ability to report on YoY, MoM, WoW and DoD changes in your sales organization helps you identify how external forces and internal changes are affecting sales. It gives you an almost supernatural confidence to change direction in real-time. For example, if you witness an unusual dip in quarterly pipeline, you can t know definitively whether it should be attributed to sales activities, or any number of other factors like seasonality, a shift in marketing strategy or even bad press. Sales analytics take an on-demand approach to historical reporting. They provide a comparative view of nearly any KPI or metric, and give you the ability to drill into details so you can understand what s driving changes when they re atypical. Not all KPIs need historical comparisons to add context, and it s important to know when to look to the past for answers so you can stay focused on effectively running your sales organization. Here are three KPIs that you should regularly examine with historical context: 1. Win rate: You know whether or not you re hitting your sales targets each quarter, but do you know whether your sales organization becomes more effective at winning opportunities over time? Historic context gives you the percentage value you need to be sure you re trending up and to the right. 2. Stage velocity: Winning opportunities tend to exhibit a model pattern of how the deal moves through the sales lifecycle. With this historical context, you can easily identify deals that are off pace from the ideal velocity pattern, and step in to correct course. 3. Forecast accuracy: You live and die by your forecast. And in no area does historic context add more value than its ability to help you confidently predict pipeline and probability that deals will close. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 9

10 Get the facts right. Put the days of data exports behind you, banish data quality questions, and watch alignment happen. Four cornerstones of cloud-based sales analytics applications: 1. Accurate 2. Available 3. Accessible 4. Actionable You may already be monitoring some of the advanced sales analytics we ve discussed. But if you or your analysts are not performing the action in a sales analytics app that connects directly to Salesforce, it adds risk and wastes time. Sales leaders often see that risk manifest in executive meetings when discussions around data quality take place. Don t like the numbers? Argue their validity. Taking data out of Salesforce also adds complexity (extra steps) and dilutes the data s meaning. Most importantly, it keeps you managing in reactive mode. You re left to fetch and analyze data rather than view analytics with ad hoc capabilities. Now, consider the flip side. Here are four cornerstones of cloud-based sales analytics applications: Accurate: No amount of slicing, dicing or computing in your sales analytics app will affect the facts that exist in your Salesforce instance, so there s no risk that you ll jeopardize the integrity of your data - the origin of your shared source of truth. Plus, sales analytics apps can sync to Salesforce in real-time, so analytics are always up to date. Available: Whether you re using an ipad app or a cloud-based dashboard, sales analytics apps give you always-on access to your data. You don t have to wait for an , inquire about document versions or clarify your needs to an analyst to get your burning questions answered. Accessible: Sales analytics apps offer triggered notifications, ed reports and even mobile apps, making it easy to offer access to data across your organization. The best part? Regardless of how widely you distribute data, you won t risk jeopardizing the facts that exist under the reports. Actionable: We ve heard hundreds of sales leaders that manage by the metrics report the same trend: giving team members access to data results in more and better questions. That s why 81% of best-in-class companies use performance dashboards to track goals instead of simply using sales data. When data is extracted from Salesforce and analyzed in an Excel spreadsheet, it loses extensibility. But when users have access to sales analytics apps dashboards they can perform ad hoc analysis and share those reports with all other users. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 10

11 Eliminate IT hurdles. Go from math to magic with built-in functions and self-service access to insight. We get visual insights into key business activities and metrics, and it doesn t mean sacrificing two days of work. Data exports, Excel spreadsheets, pivot tables, means, medians, ratios. Do you have a headache yet? Many of the metrics we ve discussed in this paper so far are possible to deliver without layering sales analytics on top of Salesforce. But because Salesforce offers no formula-driven reporting today, the process is painful, expensive, time consuming and has to be handled by technical or mathematical experts. While your company s IT team or analyst group likely has the knowledge to deliver answers, the time to value is so long it inhibits your ability to make in-quarter pivots and hit your numbers. Moreover, if you use IT resources for transactional reports, these workers are distracted from their ability to work with agility and drive innovation. Sales analytics eliminates the barrier between sales leaders and the insight in the data by turning manual, mathematical processes into on-demand requests. They enable you to drill into your data and apply computations at the click of a button - even if you don t know you re making a formula-driven request. Bob Hammond, Jumptap 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 11

12 Want to do the math yourself? Here are five KPIs top sales leaders use, and the formulas underneath them: 1 Forecasting Expected Sales Amount for the Quarter (KPI = Expected + Won) Definition: For all open and won opportunities, the total of the amount times the probability of the opportunity closing. For example, if an Opportunity has a 50% of closing and is worth $10,000, then the Expected is $5,000 for that opportunity 2 Tracking Historical Success (KPI = Win Rate) Definition: The ratio of total won opportunities to the total opportunities in selected quarters. 3 Evaluating Whether your Pipeline is Sufficient to meet your Quota (KPI = Pipeline Multiple) Pipeline Multiple is calculated by adding the potential amount to the won amount and dividing by the quota 4 Determining the Accuracy of your Forecasts (KPIs = New Pipeline & Moved In Pipeline) Definition (New Pipeline): The sum of amounts of all opportunities created within the selected time period and expected to close in the selected time period. Definition (Moved In Pipeline): The sum of amounts of all opportunities open and initially expect to close in the future that were later moved in to close in selected time period. 5 Identifying Deals that Need Attention (KPI = # Off Pace) Definition: Deals that are off pace the winning momentum are determined by comparing velocity for each stage for each opportunity in the selected quarter(s) with the average of that stage s velocity across winning deals from the past three quarters (in addition to deals already won in current quarter). If the velocity is greater than 50% of the average for any stage, that opportunity is identified as a Deal Off Pace 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 12

13 Become a storyteller. How to win friends and influence CEOs: Use visualizations to add context and persuade your audience. The expectation of backing every decision with data came hand in hand with our team s obsession with charts and visualized data. By now you re a master at using sales analytics to supercharge salesforce data. (Sure you are! You made it to section six, didn t you?). And while there s no question analytics will skyrocket your efficiency as a leader, there s another piece that defines how successful you can be with analytics. Pictures. According to IDG Research Services, 77% of leaders that use visualizations to connect the dots for their audience cite improved decision making as a top benefit. And if you ve ever seen a CEO go as red or green in the face as that ubiquitous Salesforce gauge widget upon seeing it, you know it s true. Unfortunately, adding visualizations is a manual, multi-step process for many sales leaders today. It involves exporting data out of Salesforce, massaging it in Excel, and then dropping it into PowerPoint or Tableau to increase storytelling capabilities. The good news is that this secret superpower is already built into sales analytics apps. Here are four reasons that pictures will help you win 1,000 arguments: Zoltan Toth, Prezi Faster decisions. Visualizations eliminate the can-you-explain-it-to-me layer of complexity often associated with data. That means decisions can happen more quickly, and without having to lean as much on IT or analyst resources. Longer-lasting decisions. Pictures don t just eliminate complexity, they also help you build trust through shared understanding and meaning. When peers and executives understand and buy into your plan, you get more room to manage. Eliminate barriers. When you visualize data, you strip away technical or mathematical jargon so everyone speaks the same language. Accountability. With a common story and language, it s easy to agree on ownership of numbers. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 13

14 Go beyond the basics. Combine or analyze multiple data sources to see a complete end-to-end picture of your customers Even if you supercharge your Salesforce data using the tactics we ve discussed in this paper, you ve only scratched the surface of customer intelligence. The true magic happens when you combine Salesforce data with other sources. Successful executives today use metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or marketing contribution to revenue to better manage, architect and grow the businesses. But, combining data sources requires technical or analyst resources. And the end result of a manual process doesn t allow users to slice and dice the data to answer additional business questions as they arise, or to analyze across objects, clouds and external sources. Cloud-based business intelligence tools put the power of combined data at your fingertips. Let s walk through some of the common data sources sophisticated sales leaders combine to better run their teams: Data source Marketing Automation Platform New metrics Marketing s contribution to revenue, lead velocity How it helps you sell With deep visibility into marketing s activities and clear expectations on their contribution, you ll quickly see alignment and higher performing and functioning programs. Why? Because you re no longer reacting to marketing s best-case plans, you re reacting in real-time to what they re actually on target to deliver. Data source Service Cloud New visibility Volume and velocity of support tickets, high-risk customers, customer satisfaction rates, frequent issues How it helps you sell With visibility into how you re satisfying customers (or not), you ll know exactly where to expend extra sales calories on new programs. Do you need to prevent churn, increase renewal dollars or upsell for a better product fit? Combine services or better leverage referenceable customers? Data source Zuora/Netsuite New metrics Customer Acquisition Cost How it helps you sell How will you grow your team next year? Next quarter? Justify the cost of your sales team and its growth, and make more accurate predictions for hiring, and evaluate what kind of investment you ll need in training and enablement programs. Data source Box New visibility Active users, most-used assets, content used by deal How it helps you sell Imagine if you could see at-a-glance which pieces of content have the most impact on closing deals, or see which of your reps most actively serve themselves information. You ll have powerful insight on how to develop, promote and tune your sales enablement tools and sales content assets, and you won t waste time on low-impact content. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 14

15 Conclusion Remember those questions we posed at the beginning of this paper? What deals require the most executive focus? What will make or break our goals this quarter? Which reps are our top performers and why? What is the ideal customer profile? How and when has my pipeline changed since the beginning of the quarter? Where are the bottlenecks in the deal lifecycle? Using business analytics to act on the seven tips offered in this paper, you ll be able to answer all of them (and hundreds of others). When you lead with business analytics, you ll witness your team s productivity increase, alignment with both marketing and executive leadership improve, and your business s relationship with its customers transform. That s because analytics gives not just transparency, but shared meaning to data, creating trust in the process. And trust is your most powerful resource. 7 Ways to Supercharge Salesforce Analytics 15

16 About GoodData GoodData offers business leaders Sales, Marketing Demand, Social, Service, Chatter, Yammer and Box analytics apps that allow you to quickly and easily get to the heart of your business challenges and manage by the metrics. With more than 20,000 customers, 90,0000 active users, and an 84.7 percent adoption rate, GoodData leads the charge at helping businesses embrace the changing technological and customer landscapes. The GoodData platform can aggregate endless diverse data sources, including Salesforce, NetSuite, Marketo and Excel to deliver real-time dashboards and powerful ad hoc reporting. It can handle both the increasing volume and velocity of data, and keeps up with the latest innovation through continuous enhancements that don t disrupt the user experience. Finally, the GoodData platform does all this in a collaborative context, and with support for any mobile device. Learn more at