X - Reporting and Dashboards Blog
X - Reporting and Dashboards Blog - December 2006
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2007 On-Demand Analytics Predictions
Dec 29, 2006While the shift to on-demand got a lot of attention in the business intelligence market in 2006, I think it's fair to characterize the year as one of foundation-building and learning for both traditional and newer vendors who are now embracing the software-as-a-service model. For product managers at these company's I'm sure the year was spent mostly on the left-hand side of the well-known pragmatic marketing framework. At Salesforce, we saw many new partners come to market with analytic applications on the AppExchange that both complement and extend what you can do today with our dashboards and reports. Things got really interesting when we previewed the new analytics mash-ups that will soon be available with Winter '07. Here is a brief overview of some of the partner solutions published in the Analytics category of the AppExchange in 2006:
crystalreports.com by Business Objects has a ton of potential for Crystal Reports customers. It requires the Crystal Reports Report Pack to be installed on the desktop of the report author and once reports are created they can be easily refreshed and scheduled over the web directly within salesforce.com. Business Objects made a significant investment in on-demand business intelligence in 2006 and recently announced the acquisition of another AppExchange partner. They are working hard to not only significantly improve the query performance of their Crystal Reports solutions, but also to deliver new on-demand analytic solutions in 2007.
Jasper4Salesforce by JasperSoft - Open source and on demand - not a bad combination! The initial release from JasperSoft is focused on production reporting and information delivery. Look to see this application evolve to provide more ad hoc query capabilities in 2007 as they continue to invest in the Apex platform.
Sales Executive by Visual Mining - This is a performance management dashboard application targeted towards Salesforce Enterprise or Unlimited Edition customers. The company has award-winning visualization technology and has made significant improvements to their AppExchange application in 2006.
Sales Performance Optimizer by Forcelogix - Focused on sales performance management (SPM), this application is designed for organizations with over 50 sales people. It allows sales managers to visually track individual sales rep productivity and effectiveness and so far their customer reviews are all very positive.
Carousel by DreamFactory - DreamFactory has a few other popular applications for Salesforce customers on the AppExchange and this is their latest release. They've taken an innovative slideshow approach to delivering highly visual analytics that can easily be shared and I suspect that this application will continue to improve in 2007.There are many other analytic applications from our partners that are waiting to be downloaded, trialed, and reviewed on the AppExchange. There are also many dashboard applications built by Salesforce employees that are available free of charge to help you jumpstart your CRM analytics initiative.
So what can we expect to see in 2007 in the analytics category of the AppExchange?
- More innovative solutions from both start-ups built from the ground up to deliver on-demand analytic applications and from traditional business intelligence vendors who continue to recognize the business and customer benefits of software-as-a-service applications.
- Significant improvements to all AppExchange analytic applications thanks to continued investment in the Apex platform by our partners and innovation beyond CRM made possible by Apex code. Taking advantage of the 8.0 API will be a great first step for our partners as will getting involved in our exciting incubator program.
- Some amazing analytics mash-ups of both consumer and business web applications that will allow customers to easily access Salesforce and non-Salesforce information in a single dashboard.
- Improved integration with enterprise-focused business intelligence and data integration technologies through the ApexConnect initiative.
- A number of new dashboard applications posted by customers and Salesforce employees. These free applications will continue to grow in popularity and Winter '07 will make them even easier to publish and share.
Clearly 2007 is poised to be big year for on-demand analytics on the AppExchange. Watch this space for updates from our partners, news about our own plans to deliver on some of the top analytics ideas that have been posted on the IdeaExchange, and best practice information to help drive on-demand analytic success in your organization in 2007.
What are some of your on-demand analytics predictions? What analytics partnerships are you most excited about? What feedback do you have for our partners? Drop me a line or better yet, post your comments below.
Happy New Year!
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Reporting and Dashboard Ideas
Dec 22, 2006Hopefully by now you've had a chance to visit the IdeaExchange and add your analytics ideas, vote for existing ideas, and add your comments. This site is becoming increasingly important to Salesforce product managers who monitor each category and use the site to test ideas, solicit input, answer questions, and discover some fantastic ideas that come directly from our customers. In the Analytics Category, which is defined as anything related to Salesforce dashboards and reports, there have been over 125 ideas posted, 2600 votes, and 235 comments. The #1 idea is actually Custom Report Types, which split into 2 ideas (exception reporting) but will soon be merged. This is a top priority for the analytics team in 2007. Freeze Column Headers in Reports has gotten a lot of votes lately and has jumped ahead of Scheduling + Emailed Reports and Dashboards.
So if you're looking for something fun to do over the holidays, why not spend some time on IdeaExchange? Some great new features have been added such as User History and Idea Watch. And if if that isn't enough to keep you busy, be sure to spend some time reading about the new analytics features that will soon be available in Winter '07.
Happy Holidays!
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Giving Your Channel Managers Better Visibility with PRM Dashboards
Dec 19, 2006There have been some great posts recently on the PRM blog that give you lots of tips and tricks and best practices for rolling out Salesforce.com partner relationship management (PRM). Not surprisingly, I think the best feature of our PRM solution is the prebuilt partner performance dashboards.
Recently Cyril Treacy, a sales engineer at Salesforce.com in Europe, created a series of great PRM dashboards as part of an internal competition. Here is a lead lifecycle dashboard that uses partner leads and deal registration feeds as the inputs for the VP of channel sales dashboard. The dashboards are a great way to highlight what is not happening in the channel so that corrective action can be taken. It show deal registration by partner, the average age of registered leads, channel leads by partner and the value of converted leads. The dashboard also shows the lead-to-open-opportunity conversion ratio as well as the ratio of leads converted to closed won opportunities.
Here's a partner pipeline analysis dashboard for the VP of channel sales. This dashboard follows the channel opportunity pipeline in detail. First it shows the pipeline by month, partner, and stage. It also shows the channel pipeline for a shorter timeframe and the average stage duration to help identify any pipeline issues. The dashboard also shows a partner leader board that is way to track both partner performance and adoption. In this case there is an incentive competition to encourage partners to log opportunities in the system that this dashboard is being used to monitor. The pie chart provides a nice visualization of which partners are logging opportunities.
Here is a dashboard that shows closed business for both direct and indirect sales as well as win / loss analysis. The dashboard displays channel vs. direct sales team closed-to-date, channel and direct sales targets, and closed won vs. closed lost opportunity value by partner. It also shows the % of deals closed won for each partner.
Look to see more of these types of dashboards posted on the AppExchange in 2007. There are also some great PRM analytics partner applications available on the AppExchange to help you jumpstart, complement, and extend your use of Salesforce PRM. You can learn more about what's new in Winter '07 PRM here.
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Getting Ready for Analytics Mash-Ups
Dec 14, 2006Analytics mash-ups are an exciting new feature in the upcoming Winter '07 release of salesforce.com. This means that you'll be able to display s-controls directly on a Salesforce dashboard. What's an s-control? If you're someone who creates dashboards and you're thinking of taking advantage of this Winter '07 feature, you're definitely going to want to learn about s-controls. Here's what I recommend:
- Check out the fantastic new overview and breeze presentation now available to help you get started with embedded mash-ups. Start here to learn about what's going to be possible with Winter '07 and get the basics on s-controls.
- We did a session specifically on analytics mash-ups at Dreamforce that you might want to watch over the holidays.
- Simply read about the feature and start to think about what you might want to display in your Winter '07 dashboards. Are you using other analytics tools? You might consider integrating one of our partner analytic solutions to access either Salesforce or non-Salesforce data.
I'm looking forward to hearing about the exciting new possibilities that this feature will soon enable. Keep me posted.
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Dashboards - Still the Most Popular on the AppExchange
Dec 12, 2006Three of the most popular AppExchange applications are dashboard solutions:
#4. Lead and Opportunity Management Dashboards
What actually amazes me is that these aren't even more popular. So many customers have told me that they found out about these after their initial dashboard implementation. "These saved me so much time...I just wish I had known about them sooner!" These dashboards, created by Salesforce.com employees, are the perfect jump-start for a dashboard project and they don't cost you anything.
You may have also noticed that there is now a Dashboard sub-category under Analytics on the AppExchange. This includes many cool partner dashboard applications. One that looks great and has recently been updated with new features is from our partner Visual Mining. Their Sales Executive application has received some great reviews and I recently chatted with a very happy customer. He explained that his company is extremely visual and that the Visual Mining analytics are not only used to dazzle executives, but also to identify problems in their data and to bring up questions that they wouldn't have otherwise even thought to ask. You can watch a webcast of their solution here.
Got some great dashboards you'd like to share? Be sure to read this paper to learn how to create and post applications on the AppExchange. And if you want to learn more about Apex, start here. Oh, and one small favor to ask...if you check out an application on the AppExchange, be sure to write up a review so others can learn from your experiences - both good and bad.
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Data Quality and Analytics
Dec 11, 2006At the City Tour event in LA last week there was a lot of discussion about the importance of data quality to dashboard and reporting success. I couldn't agree more. The old expression, "garbage in, garbage out" applies here. Dashboards should not simply be a flashlight into severe data quality problems. So what are some things to consider? Here is a great article called Data Quality: The Indispensable Element of Business Intelligence from our AppExchange partner Trillium.
[Update: since this was posted Trillium has consolidated and updated their Salesforce data cleansing application. It was recently named App of the Week and App of the Month in the May ADN newsletter. Here is their Diamond Data listing.]
It's been great to see the traditional BI vendors also realize that cool widgets and sliders are useless if the data is no good. Last year a colleague of mine and I wrote a paper on Information Accountability that highlights how "one bad piece of data can call into question the whole decision process."
So what do you do tomorrow as a Salesforce customer?
- Watch the Breeze presentation on Data Quality in the Salesforce Rollout Guide.
- Check out the Data Quality Dashboards created by Richard Hind, a Principle Salesforce.com Sales Engineer in the UK who recently won an internal dashboard creation competition.
- Check out the Dreamforce '06 session called, "Your Golden Ticket to Clean Data" on the use of the Excel Connector as way to "insert, update, and delete data to ensure your data is relevant to you and your business."
- If you're a new customer, spend the time to get the data right first. Have a plan, build out your processes, and don't wait for analytics to showcase your downstream data quality issues. Check out the Dreamforce '06 session called, "Easy Adoption: Making Salesforce a Reps Best Friend" for some useful adoption best practices. If you're an advanced administrator, check out, "The Path to 100% Adoption" session.
- Visit the AppExchange to learn about advanced data cleansing partner applications. Test drive, install, and review the application that best fits your requirements.
The new data validation rules feature in Winter '07 is definitely going to be a huge step forward, but data quality is just as much about the right processes as it is about the right features. Taking the time to get this right will have huge pay-offs later. Do you have data quality best-practices to share? Has data quality had a positive or negative effect on your use of Salesforce dashboards and reports?
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AppExchange Partners Unite
Dec 8, 2006Last week salesforce.com partner Business Objects acquired Nsite Software. This has received a lot of industry coverage as it represents a significant investment in software-as-a-service from a traditional on-premise company. My favorite quote is this one from Steve Lucas, vice president of strategic markets at Business Objects: "SaaS is changing the software market and the acquisition of Nsite is a big step forward for Business Objects in opening up this important new market to business intelligence. Adding Nsite’s experience and technology to our organization will enable us to extend our leadership in the growing market for on-demand business intelligence solutions, and complements our strategy to use on-demand solutions to make business intelligence more accessible and more affordable to all companies.”
Nsite has had a popular quote and propsal management application on the AppExchange for some time.
For an overview of the currently available Business Objects products for Salesforce customers be sure to watch the recorded webinar we delivered 2 weeks ago for joint customers.
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Analytics Make the Application Strategic
Dec 6, 2006I heard a great quote this week from one of our partners: "analytics make the application strategic."
Does the effective use of analytics help make salesforce.com more strategic to your organization? Recently there have been posts about creating sales dashboards, marketing dashboards, and executive dashboards that have hopefully helped you create better Salesforce dashboards. There have also been posts about how to create trending reports and better summary reports as well as many other reporting tips and hints designed to help you create better Salesforce reports. But are these analytics best-practices helping to make salesforce.com more strategic to the bottom-line success of your company?
If a strategy is defined as a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, then the above quote implies that analytics are essential to achieving the illusive "single view of the customer" goal and ultimately to achieving CRM success. A survey by the Yankee Group last year summarized the key CRM analytics benefits as:
- Improved customer acquisition
- Increased deal size
- Improved closed-loop marketing
- Improved customer retention
Clearly these are strategic goals that the effective use of analytics can help you achieve.
As for the term "analytics" itself, I think it's still a bit fuzzy. In the recently published IDC market update and forecast, the overall software category is referred to as "business analytics". Their broad market definition includes many segments – from CRM analytic applications to analytic spatial information management, to data warehouse management. IDC also includes both business intelligence and performance management as market segments under the "business analytics" umbrella, drawing a distinction between analytic tools and analytic applications. I once heard industry analyst Neil Raden summarize the distinction well by simply saying that "analytics" is what people actually do with BI tools. Let's just leave it at that for now.
Do you agree that analytics make the application strategic? Is your organization making a significant investment in analytics for CRM and for other areas of your business? Do you view analytics as strategic, tactical, or...wait for it...stratactical?
By the way, I'll be at the LA City Tour on Thursday - hope to see you there!
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