In today’s world, where data is king, businesses are constantly seeking innovative solutions to harness the power of data and gain valuable insights. One such solution is Salesforce Analytics Cloud, which empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions. The platform provides a comprehensive suite of analytics tools that enable users to collect, analyze, and visualize their data in real-time. 

The Analytics Cloud platform – powered by CRM Analytics (formerly known as Einstein Analytics and Tableau) – makes it easy for businesses to connect to their data and gain insights into their operations. It supports a variety of data sources, including CRM data, social media data, and external data sources. It also offers intuitive dashboards, interactive reports, and visualizations that help users understand their data and discover trends and patterns quickly.

5 Key Business Benefits of Analytics Cloud

1. Analytics Cloud is tightly integrated with the Salesforce platform, which gives users access to a wealth of data about their customers, sales pipelines, and marketing campaigns. This integration makes it easy for users to connect their CRM data to the Analytics Cloud platform and create custom dashboards and reports that provide insights into customer behavior and preferences.
2. The platform’s AI predictive analytics capabilities allows users to forecast future trends and outcomes based on historical data. Analytics Cloud uses machine learning algorithms to analyze large datasets and identify patterns and correlations that humans might not be able to see. This enables organizations to make more informed decisions and anticipate future trends before they happen.
3. The tool helps businesses make better decisions, improve customer experience, and save time and resources. It offers a variety of features to connect to data, analyze it, and create visualizations.
4. Perhaps the best benefit of Analytics Cloud could be its ease of use, even for non-technical users. The platform has a user-friendly interface that allows users to create custom reports and dashboards by dragging and dropping data fields. There are also pre-built templates and reports that users can customize to meet their specific needs.
5. Analytics Cloud embraces a mobile-first approach, ensuring that users can access their dashboards and reports from anywhere, at any time, using mobile devices. Within the mobile environment, users can seamlessly interact with data, drill down into details, and collaborate with colleagues. This level of accessibility enhances productivity and accelerates decision-making.

Introducing Salesforce’s GPT-Powered Analytics Applications

Tableau GPT & Tableau Pulse

Salesforce’s Tableau GPT and Tableau Pulse make data analysis more intuitive and accessible to everyone. In short, Tableau GPT is a tool that improves your understanding of your data better, while Tableau Pulse enables you to use that understanding to make better decisions with your data.

Differentiating the Two

Tableau GPT represents a game-changing innovation, leveraging the advanced capabilities of generative AI to generate natural language descriptions of data. This means that you can ask Tableau GPT questions about your data in plain English, and it will generate a response that describes the data in a way that is easy to understand. For example, if you asked Tableau GPT “What are the top 5 products that are sold by region?” and it would generate a response that lists the top 5 products and the regions in which they are sold.

Use Case Examples for Tableau GPT: A sales leader can generate visualizations based on natural language prompts to display real-time sales progress against reps quota, along with recommendations for helping them meet goals.

Tableau Pulse is a new user interface designed to make data analysis more personalized and interactive. Tableau Pulse uses Tableau GPT to generate insights and recommendations that are specific to your interests and needs. For example, Tableau Pulse might show you a list of the key metrics that you should be tracking, or it might suggest new ways to visualize your data.

Summary

The Salesforce Analytics Cloud platform – and the company’s Tableau GPT and Tableau Pulse – offer organizations comprehensive and user-friendly analytics solutions. With their seamless integration, scalability, intuitive visualizations, advanced analytics capabilities, and mobile-first approach, these tools empower businesses to make data-driven decisions, drive innovation, and stay ahead of the competition. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, these tools provide you the insights you need to unlock the full potential of your data. 

How AdVic Can Help

Conquer your data and analytics with consultants who specialize in tailoring and implementing an analytic blueprint that fuels your business for growth. AdVic® will customize your analytics tool, and train you on how to use it effectively so you can maximize its capabilities. AdVic is recognized as a Level One Salesforce Analytics Partner, we’ve demonstrated knowledge and capacity to consistently produce customer success. Our Analytics Team is at your service – and, we’re easy to work with! We’re available to get started today!

Related Resources:

The Analytics Power Inside Salesforce Tableau CRM and Tableau

Image Credits: www.salesforce.com

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Nothing moves without data analytics. Salesforce’s Tableau and Tableau CRM offer data solutions that are easy to analyze, and implement well with existing databases and/or Salesforce® CRM. Depending on a business’s needs or wants, one may work better than the other. However, having clean, usable data in a single system propels business forward.

On a recent episode of AdVic’s “Salesforce Simplified” podcast, our Analytics Practice Director, Abby Schreiber, gave valuable insight into the differences between Salesforce Tableau and Tableau CRM, including use cases of the two. 

About Tableau and Tableau CRM

Tableau is a software that works for all industries with business of all sizes. It allows anyone to visualize and analyze their data from virtually anywhere! Tableau connects with a number of databases making it accessible, and a necessity, and presents its users with ease of use as it pulls data and information from various sources and compares them alongside one another. 

“Tableau CRM does offer a handful of data connectors of its own,” Abby remarks, “but really it’s primarily used to analyze the data that’s in Salesforce. So, it’s used to maximize sales, service, and any Salesforce specific functions. So, the insights and visualizations from Tableau CRM can be plugged in alongside any live opportunities, cases, accounts, and any live data in Salesforce to help those Salesforce users make real-time decisions.”

Distinguishable Differences

While both Tableau and Tableau CRM are powerful reporting tools, they have noteworthy differences. One of the primary differences is that Tableau CRM is unique to Salesforce’s ecosystem. Tableau is a stand-alone product that can exist on its own. Again, both tools are impactful, but depending on use-case, Abby says, “One may be better than the other.”

The Advantages of Tableau

If a company has data in multiple systems and uses it across multiple functions within its business, Tableau is a great fit for them. Being that Tableau functions with practically any database, companies are empowered to incorporate data across a variety of sources. 

Abby adds, “Additionally, if it’s important for these insights to be shared with both Salesforce and non-Salesforce users, Tableau is definitely a better choice because it isn’t unique to the Salesforce ecosystem. It isn’t going to require you to have a Salesforce license to view. If you need to report on data across the entire organization, outside of just Salesforce data, you’re definitely better off with Tableau.”

The Advantages of Tableau CRM

A company that has implemented Salesforce, in need of reporting tools specifically for their users, will benefit most from Tableau CRM. Tableau CRM not only benefits Salesforce users, but changes the way they perform.

As Abby explains, “A company has to be comfortable reporting predominantly using Salesforce data, and they also should have an interest in really embedding these analytics within the Salesforce ecosystem, making these insights actionable in real time for their Salesforce users. This reporting tool makes it super easy to help the everyday Salesforce user make informed and efficient decisions.”

Tableau and Tableau CRM in Contrast

While both Tableau and Tableau CRM have the same look and feel, they differ. The biggest contrast is the use cases. Abby reiterates the difference noted as, “A Tableau dashboard might be a more holistic view, big picture, enterprise focus, function across function within a company, while a Tableau CRM dashboard would probably just be specific to data that’s in Salesforce.”

Frequent Customer Data Pain Points

The most common pain point that AdVic’s customers face is having data exist in multiple systems. Both Tableau and Tableau CRM can remediate this problem. However, Tableau is a better fit when there are multiple data sources that need to be reported in one system. This also alleviates the burden of managing dashboards manually on a day-to-day basis.

Another major pain point Abby says, “is the use of Google Sheets or Excel to produce and maintain these visualizations, which long-term is such a burden on the person who is maintaining them. So, if we see this happening, Tableau CRM or Tableau, can help with that because the data is always going to update instantaneously on a set schedule.”

Victories With Tableau and Tableau CRM

AdVic has empowered numerous customers with efficiency by way of Tableau products. Sales and support reps who once spent countless hours maintaining and managing data can now access data through dashboards that update frequently. 

In particular, Abby relates, “We recently created a dashboard [for a customer] to track their average lead conversion rates, times, and factors to help sales reps make a decision about when to continue to pursue a lead or when to just stop pursuing a lead.”

She adds, “This customer now uses that dashboard to track the key characteristics of a lead that delivers a successful conversion or a dead lead. They use this dashboard throughout the day, helping their sales team to target credible leads, be more efficient, and have more time throughout their day.”

Adaption Post-Implementation

Introducing new software to the workforce can be intimidating, however that is a challenge that AdVic chooses to fix out-of-the-gate. 

“In the beginning of the project,” Abby says, “we get to know the customer, their needs, users and owner of maintaining, managing and creating new dashboards. From there, they are engaged from the beginning to the end of the project. We use this process to ensure their comfort ability and competency when maintaining dashboards, reports on additional metrics moving forward. 

“On the other end,” Abby continues, “adoption amongst the audience is also a priority. This means understanding their current dashboard; the pros and cons of it.  From there, we translate those evaluations into a new Tableau or Tableau dashboard. In the end, user adoption is a success because of the precautions and understanding of their needs.” 

The Future of Tableau & Tableau CRM

Abby predicts that one day, Tableau and Tableau CRM will become one in the same. A recent rebrand from Einstein to Tableau CRM supports her theory. 

“On top of that,” Abby adds, “there have been some recent announcements around being able to integrate some Tableau CRM functionality, specifically around another tool – called Einstein Discovery – being able to integrate the metrics from that tool into Tableau.”

Lastly, Abby says, “There is currently an active effort to integrate both tools, as they look alike. But there have also been very recent changes to Recipe Builder in Tableau CRM, so that it matches the data prep tool, which is really just the data cleansing and relationship tool found in Tableau.” 

As always, stay tuned… AdVic will keep you posted on any and all Salesforce updates.

When you implement Tableau or Tableau CRM, you transform your data into powerful, interactive dashboards. Plus, you can securely share your data and dashboards so everyone in your organization can ask and answer their own questions right from a browser, tablet or phone. Let the AdVic multi-cloud consulting team show you how.

Related Resources:

What‘s the Difference Between Tableau and Tableau CRM? – Podcast

The Analytics Power Inside Salesforce Tableau and Tableau CRM – Podcast

Meet Tableau and Tableau CRM

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New standards require distributors to progress or sink in the competitive retail industry. For modern retail distributors, victory is to defeat challenges by finding new ways to run businesses efficiently. It is essential for distributors to have software that allows their operations to grow and remain strong in the face of change. 

More frequently, retailers are growing their businesses and overcoming obstacles with high tech solutions that provide stability, advancement and ease-of-use. A recent AdVic customer is one of those companies.

The company’s previous software, Microsoft Dynamics, was outdated and disparate. Due to having disconnected systems, business was at a standstill, as they did not have a way to conduct a true market analysis. Completing their tasks manually was timely and left plenty of room for human error and inefficiencies. 

In order to remain competitive, the company needed a digital transformation that would propel their business forward. They reached out to AdVic for assistance. 

The AdVic Challenge and Solution Overview

This particular company is an integrated food services company in the business of distribution to convenience stores, contracting with food services, and development of proprietary concepts and brands. 

The company offers innovative solutions to businesses looking to build their brand at a controlled cost and peace of mind. With their diversified customers, they require technology that is user-friendly, customizable, and that offers advanced solutions. Using Microsoft Dynamics, they felt left behind. On the prowl for a dynamic and robust CRM experience, The company partnered with AdVic to simplify processes and advance sales.

 After integrating to Salesforce®, the company reached great heights, found new successes and cohesiveness within their company’s operation and advancement. 

AdVic spoke with the company’s Certified Salesforce Administrator and Sales Training Manager about how the company’s challenges were resolved with Salesforce.

The Digital Transformation Details
The Technology: Sales Cloud  I  Salesforce Maps I Tableau  I Salesforce Mobile I  Pardot

How did the Salesforce Implementation impact your sales process, opportunity forecasting, and goals? 

“The Salesforce Mobile app has made it possible for our team to capture accurate store-level data while in the field. Salesforce provides an excellent reporting dashboard, so the real-time data that is now captured is at our fingertips.  Our team is universally ecstatic with having reliable, easy to use mobile app – because our sales goals are now easier to achieve.”

How are sales reps using the platform for better targeting? 

“Pardot was key to engaging with new customers. Now equipped with the right marketing tactics and strategies, our company’s sales representatives were able to draft marketing plans that targeted engaged customers – those prospects that are “ready to go.” With a goal of 15.4%-22% closing, sales reps are now provided with critical information to achieve this mark.

“Our company’s efficiency levels increased tremendously as repositories of information became easily accessible from wherever they were. 

“Now with platforms that communicate with one another, reps were able to balance their day-to-day duties to ensure they focused on the right targets resulting in operational efficiency.” 

 Analytics and Improvements

The company lacked the data they needed to accurately forecast product needs – this impeded their ability to provide leadership with an accurate future financial view of sales. By implementing Tableau, the company is now able to upload raw data into the system and have Einstein work its magic to provide a forward looking forecast for financial analytics. This once manual task, taking 25-hours, now takes one-hour!

 Before partnering with Salesforce and AdVic, the company was never able to conduct a true market analysis of 180,000 convenience stores they were looking to potentially partner with in an “affordable and scalable way,” the company rep remarks.  

Now that the company utilizes business data from Maps, they are able to do so. The rep explained, “We set up a proximity around existing customers, then populate the U.S. business data outside of those proximity but inside territory.” 

The company is also now able to quantify available leads that can be targeted. They have recently conducted analysis of the entire market share, which is something their company has not been able to do in 25 years. 

With Salesforce and AdVic, this company transformed its selling process, marketing, and operations. Now empowered more than ever before, AdVic equipped them with their very own platform. Tailored to their unique needs, Sales Cloud, Pardot, Tableau, and Salesforce Maps are accessible from their mobile platform, allowing for increased productivity and efficiency. Sales reps can now conduct prospecting and sell calls from their mobile devices, along with managing deals. 

Is your company in need of similar solutions as this company’s? Don’t put them off anymore! Fill out the quick form below, or click here, and an AdVic consultant will be right with you! 

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Any successful business knows that in order to find and solve problems, you have to start by looking at your data. With all of the technology out there – including Salesforce® – the hard part isn’t getting access to the data you need – it’s analyzing and interpreting your data, and then understanding how your analysis will translate into solutions to your business problems. 

So, what do you need to analyze and interpret your data? A really good dashboard.

There are a couple of different ways to approach using data analysis to uncover business problems. Some of you may already have a problem you know about or have a hunch about –  which, in a sense, isn’t the worst scenario to be in. If you’re aware of an existing issue, you have a great starting point for a dashboard. 

Example 1: Starting with a Known Problem

The last couple months, Roger (a Sales Manager) has noticed a slight drop in the number of leads converted by his sales team. Roger’s team hasn’t changed in size at all and he hasn’t noticed a drastic change in work ethic or engagement from any of his sales reps. He has confronted each of his sales reps about the change of pace – his team had no possible explanation for the shift in conversion rates and suggested the pandemic and other external factors may be playing a role. While this may be true, Roger knows that analyzing patterns and trends for the data he has access to in Salesforce will tell him more about what could be causing this.

The dashboard doesn’t create itself, so Roger needs to start with creating relevant and meaningful visualizations to learn more about a variety of lead conversion patterns. Although he may find a pattern in one of the first graphs he creates, it is important that the dashboard is created with all possible visualizations that may help him down the road, such as if this problem ever resurfaces or if he ever needs guidance on how to maximize lead conversion. This dashboard will provide him with a number of different trends and patterns he can drill into. The final result of the dashboard includes the following:

• Lead Conversion Rates and Converted Leads by Sales Rep: This graph will be useful if there’s ever someone on the team who isn’t pulling their weight.

• Lead Conversion Rates and Converted Leads by Lead Source: Leads can come into Salesforce a number of different ways, which almost always plays a role in how quickly Leads are converted and how many Leads are converted.

• Activities Logged for Converted Leads: If your company relies heavily on outreach to prospects, it’s likely that you have taken advantage of Salesforce Activities. How often a Lead is “worked” typically correlates to the likelihood of that lead converting.

• Lead Conversion Rates and Converted Leads by Region: If the problem is isolated to a specific region, it’s likely that you will need some market data to really confirm that this is, in fact, an external problem and not a business problem.

• Lead Age by Sales Rep, Lead Source: Analysis on Lead Age may tell you that the real problem is caused by leads taking longer to convert, which, in turn, is affecting your lead conversion rates.

Roger learns a lot about his day-to-day business from this dashboard – lead conversion rates have dropped pretty consistently across his sales reps and lead sources. He does notice, however, that the number of activities logged has actually increased over the last couple months. In reviewing the activity data and the notes for activities logged, Roger sees that a lot of calls to leads have not been returned compared to how many used to be returned. His company recently implemented a new automated phone system – shortly before his conversion rates started to drop. He comes up with an action plan:

• Determine the amount of time it takes to reach an Account Manager using the new automated phone system vs. how long it took before the automated phone system was implemented.
• Request feedback on the company’s new automated phone system in the next survey that is sent out to existing customers.
• Encourage his team members to focus more heavily on email campaigns or to provide leads with their own personal office line number for communication.
• Monitor lead conversion activity over the next couple of weeks to see if there’s any difference.

The dashboard will never tell you exactly what to do – it will surface patterns and lead you to take away actionable insights that will address your everyday business problems.

Example 2: Starting with No Known Problems

The more challenging scenario for businesses is when you have no known problem to solve for. Even the sales rep at the top of the leaderboard has something he or she can do better. There are always ways to improve. For this scenario, a more sophisticated data model may be a better fit than a standard Salesforce or Tableau CRM dashboard.

Einstein Discovery is AI-powered analytics that enables Salesforce users to uncover relevant patterns based on their historical data. Yes, this type of technology and depth of analysis is intimidating. Salesforce, however, has designed this tool so that little-to-no statistics background is required. The Einstein Discovery wizard prompts you to select an outcome that you would want to maximize or minimize and automatically tells you how other variables contributed to this outcome. An outcome can be something like maximizing Opportunity Amount or minimizing Opportunity Age. The results of the analysis are presented in the form of a Story.

The results of the Einstein Discovery Story start with telling you what happened. These are descriptive analytics that highlight patterns and specific factors that most influenced your outcome. Often, patterns are surfaced here that you may not even know about.

The Story also tells you why it happened – these are predictive analytics that reveal why it happened (diagnostic insights), what could happen (predicted future outcomes based on statistical probabilities), and what is the difference between variables (comparative insights). 

And lastly, the Story will tell you what could have happened: prescriptive analytics that suggest ways in which to improve your predicted outcomes. This section allows the user to change variables within their data to determine the future impact on the outcome. 

Once analyzed and refined, the Einstein Discovery Story can be applied to your present-day data. Based on the model, Einstein Discovery can provide a prediction for Amount for all your open Opportunities. It will assess characteristics about each Opportunity and compare it to what patterns and factors correlate most with a higher Opportunity Amount. Einstein Discovery can provide a prediction on what the finalized Amount will be and can provide recommendations for increasing that Amount.

Example: Setting your Outcome in Einstein Discovery

Example: Review Your Einstein Discovery Story

Whether it is through data analysis in a dashboard or by machine learning, one should never underestimate how much your data can tell you about your business. It tells you what you’re doing right and should keep, it tells you what might not be working as well as you think, and it tells you what is hurting your business. 

Bottom line, build compact dashboards and data models to give you the confidence you need moving forward to make actionable insights. 

If you’re striving for a way to securely transform and share your data in powerful, interactive dashboards, so everyone in your organization can ask and answer their own questions right from a browser, tablet or phone, and get it done without hours of coding or waiting on your IT team, you need to speak with Ad Victoriam today!

Related Resource:

The Analytics Power Inside Salesforce Tableau CRM and Tableau (Podcast)

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