In today’s competitive era, your sales team is the essence of your business. Keeping the team working at its peak efficiency is the only way to meet your sales targets and boost your business’s bottom line.
However, most businesses struggle with dispirited sales teams and consequent sales inefficiency. In fact, this pervasive issue impacts over 65% of B2B businesses that claim sales inefficiency to be their #1 business challenge. Statistics reveal that only 60% of sales representatives are able to meet their quota.
Your sales team needs to be as productive as possible for driving long-term business growth. Don’t let them fall behind by not being proactive and constantly measuring sales performance, detecting bottlenecks in your workflows, and developing a robust plan to boost sales productivity. In today’s post, we will understand all about sales team efficiency and discuss how building a data warehouse can help you achieve maximum team efficiency and productivity.
Understanding Data Warehouse and Salesforce
A data warehouse is a data management system that unifies and combines vast amounts of data from multiple sources. The system supports business intelligence (BI) and data analytics that enables organizations to derive valuable business insights from their data and use them to drive informed business decisions.
Over time, the data warehouse creates a historical record that can prove invaluable to business analysts. Owing to this, a data warehouse can be considered a business’s single source of truth.
On the other hand, Salesforce is considered the world’s leading customer relationship management platform. The cloud-based CRM doesn’t require any prior setup or management. The IT experts can simply log in and find a treasure trove of insights on sales, marketing, customer service, and more.
Salesforce enables businesses to understand their customer’s pain points, needs, and preferences. Consequently, they can strengthen customer relationships and boost their business. All customer information and interactions are available on a single platform, thereby boosting the efficiency and productivity of sales and marketing professionals.
Here are some of the most notable benefits of using Salesforce:
- Cross-functional business insights and reporting: Employees need access to the right information at the right time to sell faster. With Salesforce, a business can collate, tabulate, and customize data in the form of different reports to interact better with the leads and customers, identify trends, and boost business productivity.
- Access to actionable data dashboards: Salesforce enables you can set up a customized dashboard for every individual to convert insights into action. With these dashboards, users can see the data that is most important to their business workflow and take action accordingly.
- Proactive customer interactions: Salesforce provides the sales team with an understanding of the customers. Consequently, they can fulfill the customer’s needs and solve their issues more proactively.
- Optimized business processes: Salesforce enables automation across the business that boosts overall business efficiency. For instance, it reduces the time to nurture leads with drip campaigns.
Building Data Warehouse on Top of Salesforce
Salesforce is an incredible tool for managing your sales processes. However, at some point in time, you will most likely run up against Salesforce’s limitations, especially if you are using your business data to drive your organization.
Salesforce is designed to offer quick and easy access to customer data. However, it is not a data warehouse. Here are some issues that businesses face when using Salesforce alone.
- To begin with, storing all your customer information in Salesforce is an expensive venture. Also, extensive customizing of Salesforce to meet your precise business requirements involves a high degree of skill.
- Secondly, Salesforce lacks powerful analytical tools. Salesforce reports are beneficial if you are just getting started. But if you want to run critical queries, you will certainly require a more sophisticated analytical tool.
- Salesforce also only offers a limited view of your business. It only provides a partial look into your leads and customers and is not designed to serve as your single source of truth.
So, the only solution to make the most of Salesforce and use it to drive informed business decisions is to build a data warehouse on top of it.
As mentioned above, a data warehouse is a specialized tool for processing, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of data from multiple sources. With Salesforce data warehouse integration, your business can gather all data from Salesforce as well as other sources and analyze it to generate insights.
Building Data Warehouse on Salesforce
Here is an overview of the steps you must for building a data warehouse for your business.
- Select a data warehouse: First, you need to choose your preferred data warehouse. This is the place you will store all your Salesforce data along with data from other sources. There are several factors that you must consider while selecting the best data warehouse for your business, such as your business requirements, warehouse architecture, support for BI tools, etc. Click here to know more.
- Set up an ETL: The next step involves selecting an ETL, i.e. Extract, Transform, and Load tool. This ETL tool will pick up data from Salesforce and other sources and put it into the data warehouse in the desired format.
Run reports: Once you have all your Salesforce and BizOps data in your data warehouse, you need to start querying it. This will help to make sense of the data and derive valuable business insights. There are two ways to run reports: either run SQL queries against your BizOps and Salesforce data or connect a BI tool to your data warehouse.
Analyzing Sales Team Efficiency
With a data warehouse on Salesforce, all sales and marketing representatives have access to the same standardized data, which enables them to execute initiatives faster and more efficiently. Teams can generate detailed insights and optimally track performance metrics such as lead attribution, customer acquisition costs, and ROI.
Data warehouses can also process streams of incoming data in real-time. This further enables marketers to build ad campaigns around accurate data that produces more leads and enhanced business opportunities.
Case Study: Business Intelligence: SalesForce Tableau Report Automation
Several business enterprises manually extract information from the Salesforce database and input it into Excel sheets, owing to their deep familiarity with spreadsheets. However, with the growth in the size of data, this process not only gets cumbersome but also becomes prone to errors.
Here’s how Algoscale helped one of its clients to automate the entire Salesforce Tableau report generation process.
Our client developed Excel reports by manually transferring data from the Salesforce database to Tableau to execute further processes such as data visualizations. This required a deep understanding of the CRM system to perform data extraction. Additionally, the client’s company had to implement a multi-layer user function to limit data access and secure entry based on specific user criteria.
Our experts began with automating the reports from the Salesforce database to Tableau which was further required for creating visualizations. The final reports were published on Tableau Online for the employees to access. We also implemented an automatic data filtering system to restrict unverified access.
The overall outcome was brilliant as the client was able to seamlessly integrate all scattered data into unified datasets and boost business operational performance. Additionally, the report generation process that was earlier performed once every two weeks stood live and updated in real-time, providing the most recent updates for business optimization.
Conclusion
To conclude, Salesforce is a great customer relationship management system that enables enterprises to gather all of their customer data in one place. But Salesforce data warehouse integration can further help companies leverage the wealth of digital insights and embrace the real power of business intelligence. Building a data warehouse on top of Salesforce can empower sales reps to gain targeted information on their leads and customers and boost sales efficiency.
At Algoscale, we can help you build and implement a customized data warehouse that is meant to fulfill your precise business requirements. Our deep understanding of CRM systems coupled with our years of experience in data warehousing can help you drive smart business outcomes. Reach out to us to know more.
