With the rise of AI, the potential for uncovering transformative insights from data has never been greater. Revenue Operations (RevOps) teams are eager for it all—comprehensive reports, dashboards, trend analyses, and accurate forecasts—to drive smarter decisions and sharpen strategies. But while companies agree about the advantages of using data, there’s a disconnect from how they’re actually using it in practice. According to Salesforce’s Research, 80% of business leaders say data is critical in decision-making, yet 41% cite a lack of understanding of data because it is too complex or not accessible enough.
For Salesforce platform owners, this requires taking a strategic step back. To provide the business with the actionable insights they seek, you need to first ensure your Salesforce data is robust, accessible, and accurate. To help you, we’ve outlined four questions to assess if your data is truly ready to meet the growing demands of today’s data-driven teams.
Can You Track Historical Data Across All Salesforce Objects?
One of the biggest challenges Salesforce platform owners face is the inability to track and analyze historical data across various objects. Native Salesforce tools allow for limited tracking on certain fields, but they often provide only a snapshot of the present. The setup and maintenance required to capture historical changes can create data gaps, making it difficult to see how your data has evolved over time. Without this visibility, your organization misses crucial business and customer trends that meaningfully drive business strategy.
Readiness Check: Can you easily track changes in opportunity amounts, pipeline progression, or sales stage updates over time? Is the data tracked on a regular, automatic cadence? If not, your organization may be missing out on insights that could drive operational improvements or strategic shifts. Consider implementing a tool that automatically captures comprehensive historical data to keep your team informed and proactive.
Can You Easily Manipulate Data for Reporting Without High Effort or Cost?
Even with historical data available, preparing it for reporting can be time-consuming and costly. Many teams struggle to transform data into a usable format for generating insights without resorting to complex, labor-intensive processes. This step may or may not fall outside your responsibilities, but it’s essential for making your Salesforce data truly usable for analysis.
Readiness Check: Does reporting rely heavily on manual processes or workarounds? If generating meaningful reports requires data pipelines or costly data storage, it’s time to reassess your strategy. Even if your data pipelines have been built, if they don’t cover all of the data in your org you’re still missing valuable insights on how your data has changed over time. Automating historical data access and manipulation can reduce manual work and enable your team to focus on deeper analysis rather than data preparation.
Does Your Data Easily Connect to Your BI Tools and AI Models?
The true value of data lies in its application. To unlock insights and spot trends—like shifting customer behaviors or market dynamics—your historical data needs to be accessible to your business intelligence (BI) tools and AI models. Unfortunately, valuable historical data often remains siloed in production or data warehouses, making it harder to integrate with your analytics tools.
Readiness Check: Is your data infrastructure capable of seamlessly connecting to your BI and AI tools? If integration is a struggle, consider how much value is being left untapped. Without seamless access to historical data, you may be missing opportunities for timely, data-driven decisions.
Are You Able to Rapidly Prototype?
In today’s fast-paced business environment, agility is crucial. Your data pipelines should be flexible enough to adapt to new demands, whether it’s to gather more data to respond to a shift in market trends or a last-minute business request to add another field to the analysis– without having to wait for that data to collect. Yes, we’re saying you should have the ability to go back in time, adding new fields as if you started your analysis with them. . Relying solely on current production data or limited data pipelines can hamper your ability to respond quickly.
Readiness Check: Can you quickly access and analyze data to meet new business requirements as they arise? If you need to add new data fields to your analysis, is there a lengthy process to build the data pipeline and collect new data? Do you have to go through business approvals to build new pipelines for new fields? Rapid prototyping allows you to keep pace with evolving business needs, without overburdening your team.
Unlock Hidden Business Insights and Trends with On-Demand Historical Data
To elevate your AI and BI initiatives, you need a solution that enables seamless access to historical data without adding workload. Own Discover empowers Salesforce admins and platform owners to retrieve, store, and analyze historical data effortlessly, allowing you to track changes over time and uncover insights that drive business strategy.
Watch our on-demand webinar, Know Your Past, Fuel Your Future: Historical Salesforce Data for AI, to learn how to activate your data for improved forecasting and predictive modeling.
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