SaaS Sales Analytics for Salesforce.com

• SaaS Sales Analytics for Salesforce.com

  The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is disrupting traditional approaches to business analytics. The long deployment cycles, high costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructure required of traditional on-premise business intelligence solutions are no longer acceptable in the era of on demand.

  tags: saas, salesforce.com, salesforce, business, intelligence

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LucidEra Introduces Pipeline Insight 2.0

Lucidera has announced LucidEra Pipeline Insight 2.0, the latest release of their award-winning on-demand analytic application for sales. Pipeline Insight 2.0 introduces new prebuilt stage conversion metrics and dynamic best-practice reports that allow sales management and operations to analyze current and historical sales trends. Customers will be able to determine what percentage of deals at each stage of the pipeline ultimately convert to new business, project future results, and identify potential pipeline at risk.

With Pipeline Insight 2.0, they are extending the cutomer's ability to maximize sales productivity and results by providing interactive analysis of current and historical stage conversion ratios and cycle time trends. Sales management and operations can drill into every aspect of the sales process in order to easily identify what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s changing so they can take corrective action.

Kathy Lord, VP of Sales Programs and Operations at Intaact recently posted this 5-star review for LucidEra on the Force.com AppExchange. She also had this to say about Pipeline Insight 2.0:

"The addition of detailed stage conversion analysis will allow us to get a more complete picture of our sales funnel - how much pipeline is coming in, moving out, conversion rates, and monthly and quarterly trends. We’re able to dig into each stage of our sales process to see where the bottlenecks are and where we should be focusing our resources by industry, company size, and sales rep."

Pipeline Insight 2.0 also includes support for salesforce.com revenue schedules, which is becoming increasingly adopted by subscription-based product and services companies. Significant scheduling and flexibility enhancements have also been added to the built-in LucidSnapshot capabilities, which automatically create time-based snapshots of all opportunities in the sales pipeline making it easy to pinpoint changes between time periods.

If you’re a Salesforce.com customer who is interested in learning more, be sure to read this Pipeline Insight 2.0 overview or contact LucidEra directly to schedule a live demonstration.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is a term used to describe a set of methods and concepts which helps in improving the business decision making. It is the major part of Business management and consists of applications and technologies that allows users to gather, access, and analyse a company's data and information. Business Intelligence applications include the activities of decision support system, reporting and query, statistical analysis, online analytical processing, data mining and forecasting. Business intelligence (BI) helps in simplifying information discovery and analysis and also makes it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze and act on information, anytime and anywhere. There are various factors that influence a Business Intelligence system and they include customers, competitors, business partners, internal operations etc.

The major aim of Business Intelligence tools is to support better decision making. For the better business decision making and strategic planning, a variety of tools are there in the market. These tools are specially designed to report, analyse and present data. Some of the major Business Intelligence tools include Spreadsheets, Reporting and Querying software, OLAP, Digital Dashboards, Data mining, process mining etc

The Call for Basic Numeracy

Technology is not the fundamental challenge that organizations face when it comes to implementing business intelligence (BI) solutions. Certainly a lack of alignment between IT and business is a problem, but it’s really just a byproduct of the fact that BI solutions have been so complex in the past that business users were required to bring in IT to create for them the analysis they wanted. Of course that will lead to alignment problems. Is anyone really surprised by this? When the people asking the questions can’t answer them for themselves, and the people who can answer the questions are not the ones asking them, how could we really have expected that everything would be rosy without a lot of effort?

It’s not lack of executive commitment. Certainly, when BI fails, lack of executive commitment plays a part. But, we have to ask why the executives weren’t committed? They certainly care about growing their business, and analytics are required to do that effectively. So why aren’t they committed?

It’s not even the complexity of BI solutions. There have been tons of articles and blog posts written about how BI is too complicated. And often it’s suggested that complexity really is the core problem. It’s true that if you make things simpler, then you get rid of the great divide between business and IT because business can now be self-sufficient and answer their own questions. And BI will no longer fail because of lack of internal expertise to keep a complex system running.


Complexity is certainly a huge issue, but there is overwhelming evidence that it’s not really at the core. First, for years people have been focusing on trying to make BI more accessible by simplifying the user experience. More recently, several companies, both old and new, have offered hosted, or software as a service (SaaS) BI solutions to get rid of the complexity that is involved with managing a BI solution on premise. The Holy Grail has been to make it simple so we can deliver “BI for the masses.” But many BI initiatives still fail to get adopted and have impact on companies.

We’re chasing the wrong grail. Simplicity is absolutely required, but simplicity alone is not enough. Once you peel away the barrier that was created by complexity and give users the ability to answer whatever questions they have, you uncover the real culprit preventing companies from being successful with BI: People have no way of knowing which questions are meaningful ones to ask, and which are meaningless.


I’m not aware of any college classes that teach people how to use numbers to analyze sales, or customer support, or human resources, or suppliers. I don’t know of any business schools that teach this either. And companies don’t teach their employees — most people just end up doing something very similar to whatever they learned from their managers, if anything. To be clear, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that such classes and training programs exist somewhere, but they’re certainly not common.


Imagine what would happen if you hired someone to do accounting for you who had no background in finance. They’d be forced to make it up as they go. What’s the likelihood that they’d come up with the key financial metrics like ROI, Cash Flow, Liquidity Ratio, Debt to Equity Ratio, Current Ratio, Inventory Turns, EBIT, Days Sales Outstanding, etc? It’s pretty unlikely. So, the financial analysis this person would do wouldn’t be very useful in helping the business, so it would fall by the wayside.

This is exactly what we do with BI solutions. We ask business users to define the key metrics they need to run their business. They don’t have basic background in how to use analytics to improve a business, so they have to make it up as they go. Though they come up with some good metrics, they usually miss others that are absolutely critical. So, management doesn’t see much value coming from their BI initiative. Since it’s not really moving the needle in their business, support wanes.

We need to give people some basic exposure about how to effectively use analytics. As a society, we teach people to read and how to interpret the meaning of what they’ve read. That’s basic literacy. People also need exposure regarding what numbers to look at in their business, and how to interpret the numbers. We need basic numeracy to complement literacy.

How do we move people towards numeracy? Part of it will be up to analytic vendors and user communities to define and share best practices for analyzing a business. But we can greatly accelerate that process by providing users with analytic solutions that provide the key metrics for analyzing the various areas of their business built into the solutions. That’s why analytic applications are so useful. They get us away from generic BI tools, and move us towards real solutions focused on addressing specific business problems and which include embedded best-practice metrics and analyses.

If you don’t think this is feasible because you believe that each company does business differently and each therefore must define their own KPI’s, then I can prove it to you. I can take your sales pipeline data, apply generic best practice analyses to it, and I guarantee you that I’ll find important issues and opportunities regarding your pipeline. Don’t believe me? Then accept my challenge and I’ll prove it to you.

By removing the barrier of BI complexity, we then expose the fundamental issue that we’re providing people with tools to get questions answered, but not with the context to identify which questions have the most impact. People need to demand that their BI vendors provide them not only with the ability to get answers, but also with the right questions too.

"I Didn’t Know" is No Excuse in a Business

To succeed in your job, you make decisions every day based on your grasp and outlook for your business. Here are some typical examples:
• You are in charge of sales; a competitor is doing well and your management wants you to deal with the problem.
• You are in charge of finance; the marketing department wants to spend money and you are asked to approve the request, based on your outlook for the company’s cash flow in the coming weeks.
• You are a regional sales manager who needs to reassign sales territories between the reps. Before you do, you want to know what the impact of the change will be on revenue, commissions, and travel expenses based on past performance.
In today’s difficult economic climate, if something goes wrong, saying “I didn’t know” is not a good excuse. To maximize your success you need good visibility into your business.

There Must be a Better Way

How many times have you found yourself faced with a decision and looking desperately for data that will help you make your choice easier?
If you are the sales director who was called to deal with a new competitor, you will want to look at your team’s win/loss record against that competitor. You will also want to know what discounts your sales team offered in those deals. And you will want to look at public data on the competitor’s financial performance to see how they are doing relative to your company and to your industry.
You can access your CRM system and get a list of sales prospects where the competitor was involved, along with the status (win/loss) of the deal, the sales region, and the date.
This information is helpful, but not enough. Missing, for competitive wins, are the amount that was actually booked and the discount that was given. To get this information, you go to your accounting system. But your accounting system doesn’t record competitive data, so you can’t simply generate a report that only lists wins against the competitor. What you end up doing is generating a list of all recent deals from your accounting system. You then look at the deals one at a time and try to match the deals in the report from your CRM system with those that appear in the report from the accounting system. Adding to your challenge is the fact that company names that appear in your CRM system don’t always match those in the accounting system. One system might list deals with “Coca Cola” and “IBM,” while the other system lists deals with “The Coca Cola Company” and “International Business Machines.”
You then have to resort to cutting and pasting data in Excel once again to compare your private company’s revenue performance to that of your competitor and the industry. You get the data on your industry and your competitor (a public company) from an industry analyst web site. You then combine it manually with your own company’s revenue data in Excel.
What should have taken you minutes ends up taking hours. The process was so tedious and labor intensive that it’s hard to avoid mistakes. And, if you decide to repeat the analysis a few days later, you’ll have to start from scratch, you can’t simply “refresh” the data. Some companies refer to this as “Excel hell.” Does it sound familiar?

Say Goodbye to Cutting and Pasting

If you need quick access to your company’s data, along with other information from the Internet, you now have a simple and affordable alternative to “Excel hell.” New software as a service (SaaS) business intelligence solutions deliver the answers you need on-demand. After a quick set-up, all you need to do is connect to the web and view the business analytics you need to be successful.
The sales operations director who was trying to combine data on competitive wins and losses from the CRM and accounting systems can now access a single, dynamic report that combines the current and historical information needed. All competitive wins and losses, along with revenue forecasted, revenue booked (for wins), and discount rates can be displayed, along with the relevant sales region and date.
Bringing in external data from the web is just as easy. The sales director can view a single report that compares the company’s internal (and confidential) revenue data against public data on the competitor and the industry.
To answer most questions, the sales director opens one of the prebuilt sales analytics. If the question is new and a report is not available, the sales director can easily create a new one without any technical help from others. The dynamic web reports combine data from different business applications, in this case from your CRM and accounting systems. The data is “cleansed” automatically before appearing in the reports to address inconsistencies between the different data sources (such as the IBM vs. International Business Machines issue).
But quick and simple access to data is not the only advantage of the on-demand business intelligence approach. SaaS analytic solutions are also designed to be simple to set-up, since all you need to do is connect to the “on-demand” service on the web. And last, but not least, SaaS business intelligence applications are simple to buy and affordable. In comparison, if your employer had decided to address this problem by building an on-premise business intelligence reporting and analysis solution in house, the acquisition and maintenance cost for all the pieces would easily reach a million dollars.

Business Visibility: Your Four Alternatives

Let’s review the alternatives that you have today to answer your business questions:

1. You can ignore the data, and just guess: You can ignore the unprecedented amount of transactional information that your company’s systems collect and just use your “gut” to guess what needs to be done. This is like keeping the lights off in your room and walking around in the dark. The data and business visibility is there for you if only you flip the switch on, but instead you can just choose to keep the lights out and ignore it.

2. You can continue to cut and paste data: You can continue to export data manually from each of your business applications to Excel and then waste your time cutting and pasting the information to combine it as you try to make some sense of your business. This is like walking around the dark room while holding a candle. You can make out individual objects. If you spend enough time you can even get a general sense of what is in the room; but you don’t get the full picture all at once. And if you’re not careful and make a mistake, you might get burned.

3. You can deploy an expensive BI solution: You can have your company design, procure, and maintain in house a traditional business intelligence reporting and analysis solution, assuming your company can afford it. But this is like installing a full electric power plant in your house just to light up your room. A BI solution implemented in house to generate multi-data source reports with cleansed and consistent data would require the following components: data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) technology with connectors to your business applications, like Salesforce.com and Netsuite; data cleansing technology; a data warehouse stored in a database management system; OLAP analysis services; a query and reporting tool, like Business Objects or Cognos. Assembling all of the above, whether from proprietary or from open source software takes months to design and deploy and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and maintain.

4. You can get business visibility on demand – You can access the data that you need to be successful via the Internet and a SaaS business intelligence solution, on demand. This is equivalent to flipping on the light switch in your room. There’s no power plant in the house, the power is supplied by an electric utility company.
Which approach do you think makes the most sense for the future?

Business intelligence on demand: Why now?

You might ask: If on-demand business intelligence is such a great approach, then why wasn’t it available before? Traditional business intelligence solutions were designed for use inside the “four walls” of a company: They were built with the assumption that all users are full-time employees who access the business intelligence system inside the company’s secure network. The solutions also assumed that all the data that the users needed to see came from databases and applications sitting inside the company’s network.
In the past decade, all these “building assumptions” of traditional BI solutions changed: Many users, data, and applications now sit outside the company’s four walls. Just look at your own business today: How many of your contractors, partners, or even customers might benefit from viewing some of your business reports? To analyze your business and your market, how oft en do you access external data from the Internet? And how many on-demand business applications such as Salesforce.com or NetSuite do you use?
Traditional BI solutions did not anticipate these changes and their architectures cannot easily adapt to these new business realities. To get faster, more affordable, and simpler access to the data they need, with a solution that fits the new ways of doing business, employees are now shifting to SaaS business intelligence solutions. As with “on premise” solutions, the data is secure and users only have access to the information that they are authorized to see.
There is little doubt that future generations will look back and wonder why companies ever tried to configure full and costly BI suites of soft ware in house. For now employees simply wonder why it is so difficult to access the business information about their company that they need to be successful.
But this about to change.

Sales Analytics Requirements

For a Salesforce administrator, he already knows how important it is to become proficient with the built-in reporting and dashboard capabilities of the sales analytics application. If the salesforce administrator is not already up to speed, he should surely sign up for a training course, watch a Dreamforce presentation on the success.salesforce.com community website, and try downloading a few of the free dashboard applications on the AppExchange.
But this is only the beginning. Inevitably with Salesforce reporting, you’re always 4 or 5 reports away from answering the question you really want to answer. To understand your sales analytics and sales metrics requirements, you need to consider the following:

1) What information do sales managers, the CFO and the CEO need today to be successful?
2) What business questions are the most difficult to answer today?
3) Would people prefer to answer their own business questions?
4) How do managers prefer to access and analyze business information––dynamic dashboards, spreadsheets, pdf, PowerPoint, email, mobile device, etc.?
5) What other sources of information do people need to access and analyze in order to achieve sales success?

Sales Analysis Software

Usually every business have different sales trends and depends upon the nature of the business. Some may be cruising along the upward curve, while some may be on the opposite direction. In order to identify the business trends, there are many softwares available. These sales trend analysis softwares provide an easy way to check your sales progress and identify major areas of concern. The sales trend analysis software helps in forecasting your sales and other sales operations. Sales analysis software allows you to identify the weak links in your sales strategies and helps in fixing them. It helps to gather strategic information and insight needed to accelerate revenue growth and increase sales effectiveness. Almost all the companies have scattered customer and sales data and the process of bringing it all together is very difficult. But with a proper sales analysis tools, you will find it easier to get all the data and forecast for your sales operations.