Salesforce.com Business Intelligence

Do you find that Salesforce’s built-in reporting tools don’t give you the flexibility you need? If yes, you may be ready to explore 3rd party business intelligence solutions that allow you to choose your own metrics, KPIs and reporting dashboards.

Salesforce.com Reporting

Salesforce.com has a decent reporting system built in, but it definitely has some limitations regarding trends over time, exception reporting, What’s Changed Analysis, the items you can report on, and how you can combine information from different parts of Salesforce.com. Also, it’s not possible to mix this up with external information, such as for example an ordering system. To get access to these advanced features, you can use partner solutions that integrate via the AppExchange.

The Sales Scorecard

When you decide to use 3rd party reporting software from the AppExchange, a copy of your Salesforce database will be downloaded periodically, for example every day. This is fully automated, so you automatically get fresh reports every morning. You can choose your own metrics and KPIs, define your own dashboards, and select the exceptions that you want to be notified off. The result is that you get a continuously updated sales scorecard that helps you run your business on a day-to-day basis.

Learn More About Salesforce.com Business Intelligence

This article gave just a high-level view of how Business Intelligence for Salesforce.com works. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, we can recommend the following resources:

Learn

Read how Dave Barry at Enterasys brought sales analytics front-and-center; or view a webinar with Tina Babbi at TriNet, who moved her company from ‘anecdotes to facts.’

View success stories »

See

Take a quick tour of GoodData for Salesforce sales analytics application. See pre-built dashboards integrated directly into Salesforce CRM, and dashboards for regions, sales ops and execs.

View features »

Try

Get a GoodData account today. You can access a live Sales Analytics Demo – a complete sales pipeline analytics solution for a typical mid-sized company. Call us to connect to Salesforce CRM, NetSuite or SugarCRM.