When we first released our SFDC managed package, most of our customers were upset with me.
“We’ve just spent the last two years building up pipelines into a data warehouse to do all this stuff – you’re telling me we could have been doing it in Salesforce the whole time?”
So I had to convince them why (besides the $100k+ in savings) bringing their reporting tasks back into Salesforce would give them better data to analyze, and greater business agility.
Here are three reasons why they agreed to install our package and make the switch.
1. Real-Time ETL
When you do ETLs in real-time, you get a snapshot of the entire state of the instance at the moment that a record change takes place (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE). This means that you don’t need to worry about stale data and can enrich all of your aggregate tables through a simple query, without lots of IF/ELSE logic. It also means that your data is simply more accurate.
More accurate data, with less work? Yes please!
Can you achieve an ETL outside of Salesforce? Sure – you’d just need to figure out how to:
- stream 100% of your SFDC production data to your data warehouse
- run data transformations while accounting for race conditions (replication lag)
- pay for the additional storage, compute power, scripting, etc.
That’s 2x the data, 5x the cost (BI tool, second database, data analyst) and 10x the work (overhead of setting up, maintenance, etc) to do the exact same job.
Now, you might say that you need a data warehouse to join data across many different sources (eg: product usage vs. opportunities) and that’s right – however, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want to pre-process your data in Salesforce, where the cost of transforming the data is 10x lower, before exporting it elsewhere.
2. Greater Control Over Data and Less Vendor Lock In
Today, sales reporting is increasingly fragmented across systems and less portable.
- Want to get top of funnel data? Log into your marketing automation or sales engagement tool.
- Want to actually understand what it means? Upgrade to the ‘enterprise tier’ for an additional $50/user/month
- Want to export the data to run your own analysis (or to leave for another sales tool?). You’re out of luck.
All of these contribute towards a lot of direct and indirect costs.
Direct costs include:
- Paying to upgrade to the ‘enterprise tier’ of your sales tools
- Administering licenses and training across all the different tools
- Manually exporting, cleaning up and joining the data
Indirect costs include:
- Greater vendor lock-in (if you leave Outreach for Salesloft, your sequence data is interrupted or lost!)
- Lower adoption due to increased complexity for your end users, who may not be technical
You bought Salesforce to make it your system of record. Bringing all of your data, ETL and reporting in to SFDC ensures that vision is realized.
3. End to End Drilldowns (For Free)
It’s true – Salesforce Classic had a really poor reporting experience that made drilldowns a pain, which pushed many execs to buy Tableau. This is no longer the case with Salesforce Lightning – you get now get powerful dashboard filters and drilldown capabilities for free (read more here).
Moreover – you by keeping the reporting inside Salesforce, you can drill down to every step of the hierarchy (VP -> Director -> Team -> Rep) and every business relationship (Account -> Opportuinty -> Activity) while staying in a single system.
4. Did We Mention Cost?
According to IDC,
“the average company spends an additional $3.2 on sales tools/apps for every $1 that they spend on Salesforce”
which is already the single most expensive piece of software that most organizations will buy. This is forecast to be $5 by 2024. Sales budgets are ballooning right now just as we have entered a period of great economic uncertainty.
By better leveraging their existing Salesforce investment, companies can reclaim a budget to pay for 2-5 full time sale salaries.
Want to Learn More?
Please get in touch with a product consultant today!
