Salesforce Expands Analytics Offerings With New Apps
Salesforce announced new Sales Wave Analytics app to bolster its current analytics offerings.
Salesforce, the CRM giant, announced that it will begin creating role-specific analytics apps called Wave Analytics Apps. These apps are designed to complement its recently launched Analytics Cloud. As the “apps” name suggests, they function on both desktop and mobile devices. The company’s first app, announced today, is Sales Wave Analytics.
The new Wave Analytics Apps expand the Analytics Cloud to deliver business context and intelligence to allow instant action. Wave Analytics Apps have three major components. Accelerator Templates are pre-configured templates for users who instantly populate with CRM data, allowing businesses the ability to track KPIs and metrics personalized to each user. Historical Analysis offers year-over-year data and other historical trends. Finally, Wave Actions offer the ability to act instantly within the app by creating a task, logging a ticket, or changing performance measures, for example. Because Wave Analytics Apps are natively integrated, they offer not only prefilled data, but also updates back to the CRM for any actions taken.
Salesforce’s bread and butter is delivering tracking and client management for sales and marketing, so not surprisingly the first Wave Analytics App is targeted to this audience. The Sales Wave Analytics app is designed to provide insights for sales leaders.
The Sales Wave Accelerator Templates provide a portfolio of pre-configured dashboards and templates including pipeline management and forecasting, quarterly reviews, and more. The company example suggested that a sales executive might use these templates to conduct a pipeline review and then cross reference that with sale performance information to see if forecasts need adjustment.
The historical analysis part of Sales Wave offers the ability to explore a sales team’s performance without needing an analyst to create and produce a complicated report. Instead, pre-configured history shows data such as sales by quarter, individual productivity, average length of sales cycle, and more.
Finally, the Sales Wave Actions provide the ability to create new tasks, set a meeting, change dates, or update quotas and other data directly within the app.
Although the company noted that the Sale Wave Analytics App is the first of many Wave Analytics Apps to come, there is no timeframe for future apps. The Sales Weave Analytics app will be available later this year.
