The data that lives inside a customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Salesforce sits at the heart of modern business operations. By leveraging CRM data effectively, businesses can gain a more comprehensive understanding of all aspects of operations with surprising accuracy. Through native analytics tools in Salesforce, teams can make informed conclusions about everything from product development and marketing to process optimization and revenue predictions.
However, to achieve an even deeper level of insights, organizations should consider incorporating tools outside of Salesforce, like this one from Own.
CRM data analysis is far from a new concept. In fact, 91% of companies with 10 or more employees rely on CRM software. It's no wonder why. Salesforce’s own statistics indicate that 42% of businesses improve forecast accuracy with their CRM. Yet as many as 22% of sales professionals say they don’t use their CRM effectively.
That means there’s significant room for improvement. Keep reading for a breakdown of Salesforce’s native analytics capabilities, best practices, and innovations to keep the insights coming.
Data analysis in Salesforce
CRM Analytics, Salesforce’s native analytics tool formerly known as Tableau CRM, is designed not only to facilitate analysis, but also to synthesize data and make it actionable. CRM Analytics generates a 360-degree customer view, leveraging AI-powered predictive modeling to reveal opportunities and suggest optimizations for every customer interaction.
CRM Analytics’ key functions and features include:
- Customer segmentation: CRM Analytics makes it possible to granularly segment clients based on age, gender, spending habits, and more. Effective segmentation facilitates targeting and client retention, potentially increasing the number of clients on your roster.
- Predictive modeling: Using customer data, native Salesforce tools can accurately estimate the effectiveness of various business scenarios. Predictive modeling reduces risk by analyzing large volumes of customer and company data to guide leaders to the most advantageous decisions.
- Web analytics: Company websites are well-designed for analytics. CRM Analytics distills website information into central dashboards on the platform. Salesforce’s tools gather traffic and action data, compile it into reports, and generate relevant conclusions.
- Event monitoring: Customer relationships hinge on events, including things like completed sales, membership sign-ups, conversions, and dollars spent. These crucial metrics provide visibility into how teams are meeting their business objectives, improving communication, and even increasing security by alerting users to unusual behavior.
- Profitability analysis: Profitability analysis empowers your teams to pinpoint the customer groups and products driving the most revenue. This laser focus allows you to optimize marketing and sales efforts, maximizing profitability over time.
- Third-party customization: Without flexibility in your CRM, there will be limitations. Third-party apps work seamlessly with CRM Analytics tools to deliver more insights and performance than out-of-the-box configurations.
Salesforce Analytics best practices
To get the most from analytics while minimizing rework, it’s important to establish protocols and follow best practices that ensure dashboards are aligned to your priorities, address gaps, and are highly functional for the teams that rely on them.
Getting the most out of Salesforce is as simple as following conventions that account for every stage of the process—from prep and security to backup and reporting.
Data preparation
The first step of any analytics process is to ensure that the data flowing into the system is secure and well-governed. This means establishing guardrails to flag duplicate data, misnamed items, and other issues. Most importantly, processes should be automated as much as possible to eliminate human error (and frustration).
Dashboard optimization + usability
Conducting regular performance checks on your Salesforce dashboards and their queries confirms that everything is running smoothly and allows for tweaks as necessary. Dashboard inspectors make it easy to identify and remove bottlenecks such as redundant queries. Modular dashboards can limit pages to the most relevant content for particular users to maximize usability and eliminate learning curves.
Data security
User permissions, view settings, controlled downloading and sharing, and regular backups are all part of healthy CRM data. Well-planned security means that data remains uncorrupted and highly usable while safeguarding sensitive customer data.
Well-designed datasets
The underlying data must be governed and optimized upon intake to lay the foundation for dashboard performance. As such, it's important to ensure that calculations are completed at the dataset level instead of the higher dashboard builder level in CRM Analytics.
Time series snapshots
Time series data is a crucial element that underpins effective historical analysis and predictive forecasting. Comprising data points taken at specific intervals and timestamps, time series snapshots facilitate the identification of data trends, patterns, and changes, while enabling more robust historical analysis and cluing users into any anomalies or data outliers.
Make the most of your data
Making full use of SaaS data—especially historical SaaS data—isn’t as difficult as it may seem. In fact, Salesforce was designed with new tool integration in mind, and as such, is primed for users to integrate technology that can make analytics easier and more effective.
At Own, we help companies use SaaS data to its utmost potential and ensure that it is also intuitive, compliant, and sustainable. By empowering Salesforce users to do more with their CRM data, such as leveraging historical insights to build a brighter organizational future, we’re supporting innovation around the globe.
Own Discover is designed for historical data access and analysis that supports training AI and machine learning models, facilitates exchange with other systems, and drives new insights into business processes. Armed with this tool and the knowledge that comes with it, businesses can innovate more and worry about data management less.
Learn how Discover can help your organization activate historical SaaS data and amplify your business.
