Sales and marketing professionals have their task cut to drive sales, and always look to create campaigns that resonate with prospects. Data is the game-changer here; and Salesforce Analytic Cloud has become a Holy-Grail of sorts for many marketers and business managers, allowing them to explore and visualize data on hand.
The Analytic Cloud is much more than a high-end, big data-visualization tool. It makes it possible to explore available data, cutting across repositories, in any combination, and generate insights on the fly. The key-value-store, NoSQL database, makes it easy to explore not just data residing in Salesforce, but also bring in data from any third-party app, desktop machines, or any other public source. The suite integrates with the CRM, and leverages technology to enable users to add new data sets from such disparate sources to existing corpus of data. They can modify searches and queries in an almost infinite permutations, to analyze customer data from a contextual standpoint, and thereby discover new patterns that may be applied to drive new business.
The Analytic Cloud’s USP includes a robust back-end data-management service, end-user-facing query-and-analysis “lenses” for data exploration and dashboards that indicate key performance indicators and persistent reporting. It picks up security-and-access controls hierarchies from the Salesforce platform. The platform is capable of processing millions of rows of data and applying multiple filters to generate elegant charts on the fly. It deploys the latest cutting-edge technologies, including massively parallel processing, key-value pair data ingestion, and search-based exploration, to move through data at unprecedented speeds.
It is poised to get better, with Salesforce announcing some enhancements to the Analytic Cloud on 23 June 2015. Salesforce has even released a free playground version, which allows marketers to upload data and test the exciting new features on offer.
Here are some of the new possibilities with the enhanced Analytical Cloud:
- Salesforce Analytics Cloud interprets inbound Microsoft Excel, and .CSV data files, making the analysts job much easier. The new enhanced version interprets Salesforce Report and Google spreadsheets as well. It defines the type of data in each column as a measure number, dimension or date.
- As always, the uploaded data displays in an easy to view report format, and simply clicking on the green button, “Process My Data”, subjects the data to analytics, and opens up the main area of the Analytics Cloud.
- The Analytic Cloud makes it easy to undertake a comparative analysis of data. For instance, it is possible to select new segment size by easy drop down menus, and even the segment size values from absolute figures to percentages.
- The wide range of available filters infuses dynamism to the Salesforce Cloud. Filters are available for each measure or variable used in the analysis, allowing the analyst to select specific values or ranges from the result churned up. Filtering modifies the chart instantly, and analysts may select desired filter, such as, say “sort descending feature” from the list of available options, to generate pie slices sorted by count and percent.
- The intuitive dashboard allows users to click on the individual components and explore subsets. It is now possible to complete a graphically-driven analysis of complex and extensive data sets in a matter of minutes, easily.
The enhanced Analytic app makes it possible to access the deep insights from any device, in any location, in double quick time, and share the same seamlessly across the team. The Wave Analytics Apps not only extent the cloud analytic capabilities to business managers and analysts on the move, but also offers the convenience of prepackaged templates that are capable of meeting specific needs according to use, and provide meaningful data appropriate to the context. The Sales Analytics Wave, the first in class app, will allow businesses to leverage the new forecasting management tools to get even deeper, comprehensive and inclusive insights on the sales pipeline and performance.
Companies have already started to leverage the tremendous possibilities that the Analytic Cloud promises. The real-time nature of the platform, wherein the business manager or executive may draw up data from multiple sources and generate insights instantly, without having to wait for the results of the work done by business analysts helps them close deals instantly and thereby shut out competition. The marketing executive may crunch numbers using his smartphone, drawing data from multiple sources, even as the meeting with the client is on, in real time, and make commitments without having to get back at a later time.
Sales and marketing teams will no longer be handicapped by lack of insights, and would be able to cut the time to market considerably. In fact, the availability of the cloud makes insights a given factor, and marketers can now give more attention to their core competencies of identifying new leads and engaging with them at a deeper level. Marketers can save valuable time on analytics and number crunching, and use that time to engage with their prospects and customers on a personalized basis.
At the back-end, the top management may use the platform for a real-time analysis of sales pipeline, and sync this information with sales performance of products, to determine whether to revise forecasts or not, and whether to take any corrective action. The Analytic Cloud makes this otherwise laborious exercise, involving much effort, a simple matter of a few clicks on the smartphone, with the results generated in a jiffy.
GE Capital is using the Analytic Engine to equip its salespeople and sales executives with real-time latest insights on loan cycles, lending trends, and loan-conversion ratios, filtered by time, region, and by salesperson. They also do root-cause analysis of lost deals this way. Executives of Blue Cross/Blue Shield use the analytic cloud to get real time insights on cost-per-sale, distribution mix, and administrative expense ratios.
The possibilities are endless and limited only by imagination. The fact that the suite is extremely user friendly and self-explanatory to the extent that any user may get the desired result without the need for user manuals or extensive training means that it is capable of being a common tool that may just revolutionize how data analysis takes place.
To know more or leverage the benefits of the Salesforce Analytic Cloud, write to Suyati at services@suyati.com.
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