For over a decade, I have served in various sales and marketing capacities at a number of tech companies - from early-stage start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. The companies differed in their offering, size, organizational culture, and human fabric. Yet, they all had one thing in common - the tension between the Sales and Marketing teams.
It is almost inevitable. One of the Marketing's main roles is to generate leads and increase the sales funnel, and it is the Sales' responsibility to close those deals. There is one outcome - the revenue - with both teams sharing the responsibility. This co-dependence often turns into finger-pointing when things don't go well. Marketing typically expresses frustration over all the hard work invested in generating high-quality leads only to have sales neglect to follow up on these leads. Sales, on the other hand, place doubt on the quality of the leads produced by Marketing and grow weary of Marketing' activities and efforts to re-package, re-brand, re-message everything.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
Research says that one way of mitigating the Sales and Marketing rivalry is to establish processes and systems that encourage communication and collaboration. A streamlined way to process Sales and Marketing data under one umbrella is crucial. If only there were a single source of information that both sides could consider as objective metrics.
In most cases, the data is there - but generating data streams is one thing; properly analyzing them is a different story. Data visualization can help solve the majority of data processing challenges and neutralize unnecessary tensions between teams.
In my ideal world, all the Sales and Marketing teams on Earth are using Einstein Analytics to draw conclusions about the efficiency of marketing activities and their influence on sales performance. Einstein Analytics is an unprecedented data visualization tool that serves as a single source of truth for Sales, Marketing, and Post-Sale projects. With Einstein Analytics, you can bring in data from Salesforce and any other external sources, including different Salesforce orgs, and create dashboards that present concise, actionable data, ready for the most optimal decision making.
The solution comes with the pre-designed template dashboards that can visually serve any data and deliver dozens of "aha" moments for all users, in a matter of a few clicks. If you require a customized dashboard for your unique business needs - you can quickly generate GORGEOUS custom visualizations for any purpose.
Here is my quick review of Einstein Analytics and its main features. I hope you can find it valuable.
What is Einstein Analytics?
Einstein Analytics (part of salesforce’s data analytics tools, recently renamed as Tableau CRM) is a Salesforce native tool - secure and scalable, that enables visualization of organizational data insights. Visualization of data enables business users to identify areas that need attention instantly, discover factors affecting customer behavior, understand sales cycles, and predict the organization's performance.
Why Einstein Analytics? Sometimes, Salesforce is not enough.
Salesforce has the best reporting capabilities in the CRM category, but not without limitations (four object relationships for a report type, the need to use the same data source for creating reports, and of course, the use of the data exclusively generated in your own Salesforce environment).
Einstein Analytics removes these limitations and enables users to process and explore any data - whether pulled directly from Salesforce, uploaded from CSV files, or automatically brought in from external sources. If your organization has a number of Salesforce orgs, don't worry, it is really easy to connect them all under Einstein Analytics.
How Einstein Analytics is Designed
Einstein Analytics comes with a set of main components:
App
The app is a folder that can store multiple items, such as datasets, lenses, and dashboards. It is similar to how the Salesforce report and dashboard folders function, enabling sharing the app by username, role, and group - providing various access levels. Just like in Salesforce, in Einstein Analytics, each user has a Private App for personal use.
Dashboard
Dashboards are where users explore and analyze data using widgets. Widgets using the same dataset or linked datasets are related to each other with facets, enabling users to broadcast data to other widgets and run any data segmentation or analysis. For example, if you click on the "Proposal" stage of the opportunities chart, it will display the table widget's data. In Dashboards, users can create tasks, open and change records, and share insights with other users.
Lens
Think of a lens as a Salesforce report that the dashboard is based on, but the lens itself is not a data source. Lens has two mechanisms - Query and Dashboard. You can use queries to choose which data to present and how to present and compute it, while Dashboard is the visualization of the data that you've chosen and designed in a Query.
Dataflow
Use dataflow to create instructions for Datasets generation (fetch, augment, join, and filter datasets). But let's not give Dataflow too much attention, as we hear, it will soon become obsolete, and will be replaced by Recipes.
Recipes
A recipe is a sequence of transformations that Einstein Analytics performs on source data before loading it into a dataset. For example, you can add transformations that combine data from multiple datasets, pull data into buckets, create new columns based on calculations using other columns' data (formula columns), and clean the data to make column values consistent. You can then output the resulting data to a new target dataset. Just keep in mind that you can run up to 60 Recipes or dataflows in 24 hours. That is why it is Einstein Analytics' best practice to use lens queries for performing calculations and adding filters. If you absolutely must create more than 60 datasets a day, you can run them all in a single recipe, and not worry about this system limitation.
Ready-to-Use Templates and Dashboards
Einstein Analytics comes with a rich set of ready-made templates that are simply spectacular and tremendously useful for a variety of users:
Sales Analytics - these templates enable the view of opportunities by owner, customer, geography, product, and source, and a drill into the details. Managers of sales teams can track how sales reps rank across various key performance categories and time periods and identify coaching opportunities to make the whole team more productive. Additionally, sales reps can track their performance based on multiple KPIs.
Service Analytics - these templates let your support users gain a better understanding of their customers, gauge customer satisfaction, identify which products or channels being served best and worst, based on impact, the volume of cases, and the duration to close.
Pipeline Analytics - Take any dataset with Pipeline Snapshot data and plug it directly into the Pipeline Waterfall dashboard with point and click.
Change Analytics - history data in any Salesforce object to see how, when, and where members of your team change data.
Einstein Analytics Features
The solution enables a strategic and interactive analysis of complex data and is equipped with features that standard Salesforce reports and dashboards can't provide:
A quick exploration of data with prebuilt apps
Large dataset capacity - supports hundreds of millions of rows
Real-time data view directly from the dashboards - visualize business data on a single screen, without having to switch between systems, apps, or pages.
Multi-org data connection
Any data from any source
View of Einstein Analytics dashboards in Salesforce lightning pages
No filter limits
Forecasting and AI-powered insights
Easy custom dashboards design
Integration of 3rd party apps from the app store
Mobile App
In the next post, we will talk about Einstein Analytics charts that we love - Waterfall Chart (Pipeline trending), Origami Chart for Sales Funnel Visualization, and Sankey chart. These charts equip the decision-makers with unique business insights that help distill crucial trends and developments for optimized business operations. These can be created based on the ready-made dashboards available in Einstein Analytics or adjusted to your organization's unique needs.
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