Ride the Wave and Crush Your Sales

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining our webinar today. Ride the Wave and Crush youh Quota Analytics Cloud for Sales. My name is Ramya and I'm a Product Marketing Manager on the Salesforce Analytics Cloud. Today we'll be focusing on trends in the sales landscape as well as an overview of the Analytics Cloud product. And with me, I'd like to introduce you to Anna Lozeman, a colleague of mine and Senior Director of Product Marketing for Analytics Cloud as well. Hi Ramya. Thank you for having me. I'm also really excited to welcome our customer guest, Max Leidstrome, Chief of Staff at Unitrends, who will be sharing very interesting insights and stories about his journey with Analytics Cloud. Welcome Max.

Thank you. Good to be here.

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So quickly, before I begin, I just want to note our Safe harbor statement. You can read this in more detail on our Salesforce website. But basically, if you're making any product purchasing decisions, base that on current product offerings and not solely on this presentation. Without further ado, let's get started. So here at Salesforce, in addition to making great products for our customers, we like to also keep in tune with key industry trends. And actually recently, Salesforce research focused on the sales space and we surveyed over 23 global sales leaders to discover how high performing sales teams evolve and stay ahead of the curve. And we came up with these four main areas. First, analytics is key for sales success. In fact, across teams at all these levels, we will be seeing a 58% increase in sales. Analytics use from this year to 2016. And that's specifically in the sales space. Secondly, mobile is key. Among all of our sales leaders that we surveyed, mobile sales apps will actually more than double in usage over the next two years and that's 125% growth. Collaboration and teamwork is also key. In fact, high performers are nearly three times more likely than under performers to view sales as 100% the responsibility of an entire organization. And so the idea here is that it's in it to win it as a team and not an individual salesperson. And finally, being tech savvy is really important. And using technology to free up time so that you can sell more, interact with your customers and gain optimization is really cool. So as you can see as sales leaders, you guys are all striving to manage and grow the best teams and there's a lot going on in this space. Anna, what do you think? Any thoughts about this? Well, I think that it's clear that there's four key trends and I just want to double click quickly on sales. Sales, analytics. Ultimately, sales managers, sales reps, sales executives, they are getting insights. And getting those insights from analytics is really critical. We need to figure out how we're going to change course when we get visibility into forecasts. We need to take a look at our pipeline and take a look at next quarter's pipeline and see which deals are the ones that we need to be accelerating. There's not a single sales manager that's not looking to spot trends or find those great performers in their business and elevate them. And ultimately all of this is rooted in the three trends you mentioned. In collaboration, in mobile, in technology, and really in getting insight and getting answers from analytics. Absolutely. And as a sales manager, you are really interested in delivering insight to action. And some of the things that you might be focusing on are changing the course of action quickly as soon as you have visibility into your forecast, moving forward, the right deals in the pipeline, especially when you're at the end of the corner spotting trends quickly and coaching your sales reps, you want to elevate the champions and share those best practices and working with KPIs. And the list keeps going. Exactly. But the thing is that analytics currently are disconnected from sales teams. So what does this mean? So current products out there are really designed for experts. For instance, if you want to ask a question around, you have to email that expert. And if you for instance, want to look at sales by product and segment, you can't get that by yourself. You have to tap into the IT department, ask that person who has that access to that information. And that's really frustrating because you need insights right away. And secondly, products are for desktop only, which is really frustrating because, hey, if you're, for instance, on the road to a sales rep. Exactly, exactly. You want to be able to have mobile access and be able to look at maybe what are the information and what was sold in the past right there on your mobile device. And lastly, spreadsheets, all the data that you have, there's a lot of manual manipulation that goes on. And with spreadsheets, it's hard to get. I mean, yeah, you have access to that on your phone, but it's not real time. And that's a big problem. And so I think that these are problems that definitely make it difficult for sales managers, leaders, executives to get the answers they're looking for. Because what we're seeing, or what we saw in the marketplace some time ago was that traditional analytics were not giving a complete view of the business. They weren't mobile, they weren't actionable, and they were not where I work. And the I here is not the data analyst or the PhD. The I is the business user, the front office business user who is talking to a customer day in and day out. And that's why at Salesforce we introduced Wave Analytics a year ago. It is analytics for the rest of us. We wanted it to be for everyone. And again, everyone here being business users who are spending too much time in spreadsheets and would rather be getting insight. Wave analytics was built mobile first and it is a platform for any data and any app. And I think, to your point, Ramya, when we were looking at all of those trends that impact sales, we found that our customers were getting a lot of value from Wave. We saw that EMC was struggling to get pipeline visibility at the end of every quarter. They were spending a few weeks reconciling information from different systems in order to understand how they had performed and understand how next quarter was looking like and every different. And sales leaders were ultimately looking at different pieces of information with Wave single view, it's fast insight, it's mobile, it's everywhere. And everyone can get that pipeline visibility, whether you're the vice president who has the luxury of having a team of analysts and experts that support you, or you're a sales manager that might not have that luxury but still needs insight. Georgia Capital, another one of our great customer success stories. They were one of our first customers when we were still in pilot and what they were looking to do was empower their global relationship managers. So at ge, global relationship managers work to service customers that might have a relationship in Europe and Asia and the US and it was very difficult to get a unified view of those customers. It was difficult to necessarily have the far reaching conversations with CFOs and CEOs that their managers needed to be having. And with Wave they were able to get really fast time to value, roll it out and be compliant because this is built on the Salesforce cloud and that is a compliant cloud to get people the information they needed. And I think the other story that I want to highlight before Max tells us his story, which I think unitrends is great, but I think that every single company, whether they are trying to focus on sales or marketing or service, are trying to elevate leaders and give people visibility that they need in order to be successful. And at HMHarcourt, sales reps are able to collaborate with one another and make that collaboration data driven rather than guessing and hoping to understand what the next best steps are. Everyone is armed with those steps whether they're on a tablet or on a phone, or if they're in front of their desktop trying to connect with their team. And so with Wave we were really excited to see these interesting sales success stories that were in line with the trends that you had kicked us off with Ramya and focusing on sales and pivoting back to what so many of our customers come to Salesforce to do. We actually introduced a sales analytics app called Sales Wave. And what this is designed to do is to take the data that you've already got in Salesforce and the investment that you already have in Salesforce and extend it by providing more visibility and analytics. So what is Sales Wave? It is in pilot, I should say so we launched it, but we've still got our pilot customers helping us make it perfect. But what Sales Wave will come with is sales accelerator templates. So essentially those key things that sales managers and executives want to do, whether it's pipeline management, QBRs, team coaching, we've pre built dashboard templates with a lot of those KPIs and best practices. And because this is natively connected with Salesforce, all of the data that you have in Salesforce will pre populate those templates which of course you can personalize. Sales Wave comes with historical analysis so you can do the multi year trending and track year over year performance. And finally Sales Wave comes with Sales Wave action. We talked a lot a little bit earlier or Ramya had mentioned that some of the analytics tools out there are disconnected. And they're disconnected because maybe they're in a spreadsheet, they're disconnected, maybe they're an entirely different system. And what that means is that your reps and executives might be bouncing around, they might be going to three or four different places in order to get the answers they need and then take action with Sales Wave actions, you can actually take that action from the point of insight. And I think that Remya will demonstrate how you can be exploring your information and then seamlessly bring it to your source of truth if it Salesforce. And the reason that you can take actions, the reason that the data is pre populated, the reason that this is up and running so quickly is because Wave is the sixth quarter on the customer success platform. So everything that you've come to expect with Salesforce, with an open ecosystem, with a scalable metadata platform, being in our trusted multi tenant cloud. That also applies to Wave analytics, which allows our customers to be up and running very, very quickly with an analytics platform, much more so than they would be if they were trying to build something standalone or on premise. So with that, we talked a little bit about Wave analytics, introduce some customer stories, talked a little bit about the Sales Wave app. I think before we get to the best part of the conversation, which is Max, I think we should probably show the product if you want to kick it off. Absolutely, absolutely. So Anna and I just kind of gave you a quick rundown about the landscape of sales and how analytics cloud is really empowering that space. And so I'd love to show you all in real time how it might work both on mobile and desktop. So today I'm going to play the role of Julie Chavez, a sales RVP at DTC Electronics. And just making sure. Can we all see from the screen?

Awesome.

We are trying to get to the demo, so bear with us everyone. And Yahsi, Great. Got it. We're good. So I'm Julie Chavez, I'm a sales rep at DTC Electronics and I'm on my way to the office where we'll be having our weekly forecast review call. So on my way to work, I'm going to open my SalesforceOne app just to check out what's on my feed and what's going on. Well, the first thing that pops up on my chatter feed is that, hey, Johnny Green has posted that there's a new promo for new light tablets. Well, this is awesome. And one of the things that's running through my head is that, hey, I would love to leverage this and really make sure that my team knows about this so that they can. Exactly, absolutely. The great thing about the analytics app is that I can really gain these insights and start cranking and looking at my data even before I get to the office. So one of the things that I'm thinking is that, hey, I'm going to want to know who our top performers are. I'm going to want to know how these new light tablets have been selling lately so I can come up with a strategy. So what I do next is that I'm going to toggle over to my analytics app, actually. And if I click on the upper left hamburger button, there's a lot of apps, they're pre built. And what's great, there's a pre built dashboard, I swipe back to the right again. Again, pre built dashboards, there's lenses, there's my data sets. But what I really want to go into is my business review. And so the business review dashboard is this. This is part of sales wave. This is one of the sets of dashboards that we walk through. Again, you can see that it's built mobile first, but it's also accessible on your iPad and step 20. Absolutely. And the great thing about this mobile app is that I can filter and slice and dice the data right there at my fingertips. So here I'm looking at total one by quarter, but I can filter by month. And if I actually swipe to the right, I can view the data in a different lens, by customer, by geography, by owner, source and product. Well, of course I'm thinking that, hey, this is specifically for the tablet. So I'm going to drill down into product and specifically drill down into tablets just to see what's going on here. And specifically what I want to know is who are my top sellers for this product in the past. So I'm going to filter by account owner. And hey, I see the top performers for selling this product are Irene, Dorothy and Evelyn. So what I want to do here is actually share this screenshot with specifically Irene and I'm going to share it through the SalesforceOne app. And I want to call out that, hey, there's a spiff going on here and that I want her to target the spiff for her future sales. So what I've done here is that I've done some annotations and I actually want to send her a note that hey, there's an end of the quarter sif coming soon and I'm going to share that directly with her. And so what's really cool here is that Ramya was able to go from a pre populated dashboard that already had all of her Salesforce data to to take a look at all the different ways that her business was faceted that were all connected to one another, then drill through that data. As you saw when she clicked Explore she specifically focused on account reps, but she could have sliced that however she wanted. That's really the beauty of being a flexible analytics tool and with our search based approach and then make an annotation to share directly into Salesforce and that's really closing the loop with collaboration and working together. Right from your phone. Absolutely Anna. And now hey, I'm in the office and I'm wanting to drive my weekly forecast call directly from my desktop. So I have Salesforce open up and here in my chatter feed I again see that this and again the benefit here with the analytics cloud is that hey, I can gain insights from my phone as well as desktop. So what I'm going to do is go into sailglave and here's an overview dashboard. Again they're pre built dashboards that I can readily use and again similar to mobile, I can view them really easily and drill down as needed. So forecast to review starting from the left type review, so on and so forth. And that business review dashboard that we saw on the phone. Yes, absolutely, absolutely Anna. What I'm noticing here is that hey, if my forecast to quota is 50 and that's pretty darn low, so I want to drill in to see what's causing that and how I can even maybe take advantage of this. So I'm going to click into review forecast and here I get a deeper look into what this forecast review is actually pulling in from. So there's a closed deal expected to close and then that's contributing to the forecast. But I'm noticing that here up at the top expected to close, really what my forecast is bringing in is just the committed account. So I want to be a little bit more opportunistic and bring in my best cases. So I'm going to click on that. And again the great thing about analytics cloud is that I can click different filters and again see the data in different ways. And I'm going to update this dashboard and it changes and I notice my forecast to quota has increased to 91%.

Better.

Exactly. I mean like that's better than 53% for sure. But hey, I want to get that up higher and so what I'm going to do is drill down even further and go click into review type. And what I'm Actually thinking, Anna, here is that, hey, what if there are deals that are in stage five, like in negotiations that are in the next quarter coming up that I can actually pull in right now and maybe expedite that process with the sip. So here on the left panel, I'm going to click on next quarter. And here at the top we have a Piper View view and we have a pipe expected to close. And again, this is just ways that I can filter and slice and dice the data. And this is for those of you who are on the webinar. This is moving really quickly and if you want to see the interactivity of the product, you should check out our Playground because it's faceted and very responsive. Absolutely. Thanks, Anna. So what I'm wanting to know is that what are the deals that we have that are in the negotiation stage, stage five for the next quarter and see if I can bring them in? Well, what I'm going to do is in the pipe expect to close, I'm going to toggle into the stage view. And stage five for me is a counselor negotiation. So if I click on that part of the pie chart, then it drove down even further and I'm really concerned with tablets here. So again, on this product family bar graph, I'm going to click on tablets and I want to know who are the salesmen who are owning these type of accounts. Well, I noticed Laura Garza here and if I scroll down, there's one account that is stage five tablets. Awesome. I'll take it. I'll take it. Right now I'm noticing here that she's about to close Turner 924. What I want to do is really have a chat with her and make sure she's aware of the spiff so that she can utilize it and have that closed for this period and not wait until the next. So the great thing here is that I can again use my insights and my dashboard and assign a new task to Laura. So I'm going to click on that toggle and I'm going to tell her that, hey, like there's a spiff out there, let's take advantage of it. I'm going to set the due date to the end of the month and I'm going to assign it to Laura and I'm going to assign a new task. And as you've seen right now, there's so much benefits to be had from the mobile version of analytics cloud to the desktop. Not only can I review insights on my way to work, or even better than that, like as I'm going to the customer, but I can really leverage the insights here and really teach and coach my sales team on how to act and how to make sure that we're doing best practices. Awesome. Really closing the loop from your analytics tool. So everyone, that was Ramya walking us through the Sales Wave app and we've got a number of, we've got information on our website and if you guys want to try it out though, one of the places that I like to go is go to our playground and we'll give you directions on how to get there at the end of the presentation. But what it allows you to do is actually take your own data, whether it's data that lives in Salesforce, whether it's data that lives in a Google sheet or in a CSV file in a spreadsheet and view it within the wave platform. It won't actually upload the data anywhere, but it can allow you to experience and explore to get a sense of how the platform works. So with that, I think we're coming to the most exciting and interesting portion of the conversation. We've got Max here who's the chief of staff in unitrends. Welcome Max.

Thank you. Well, hopefully I can live up to the expectations of that setup there. Like you said. My name is Max Ludstone, I'm the chief of staff at unitrends. Unitrans is a customer obsessed disaster recovery and data protection company. We offer a full range of software appliances that are purpose built to run that software, cloud archiving, disaster recovery. As a surface, we're 100% channel company and we're based in Burlington, Massachusetts. My role is chief of staff, which is sometimes that person they referenced early in that meeting, that expert you have to go to for information. It includes that role. So put that asterisk on there. But generally speaking, the leader of difficult cross functional projects mainly focused on building and supporting scalable infrastructure as well as reporting. So some of the challenges we had that we're trying to solve with the Wave platform, the two most important ones were disconnected data and people not being empowered to be able to use that data for not just running a report, but to really answer questions. And as you get to that inflection point of growth of $100 million or 500 employees, there's unlimited amount of challenges. People, process systems, tools, they all require some form of change and you really kind of grow out of your own skin operationally and analytics and optics become more and more critical. And one of the things that I think people overlook a little Bit is data becomes more disparate and the skill sets get diluted. And I was trying to think of a good analogy as to how to explain this. And so hopefully this resonates with folks envisioning two small pyramids with three levels, about the size of a small car, each sitting right next to each other. Now, the top of the pyramid is your executive leadership, and the bottom end is the people that are actually down there doing the work. Both are relatively close to each other. Right. But as you grow in size and as you scale, they get further and further and further apart. And the change you have is gradual, so you don't really notice it, but it slowly becomes more and more different. The reporting, the system you're reporting from, the types of reports you're using, they become slowly, slowly less precise. But at the same time, your precision, your tolerance for inaccuracy becomes more stringent and you get to some point eventually, well, geez, why do we have these silos? How did this happen? And you have to then take a step towards consolidating into unifying onto one version of the truth. And that's really one of the main sources for pain that we're looking to solve with the wave analytics platform.

And so, Justin, those definitely, and let me go back, those are real pain. I don't think they're unique in the sense that it's difficult if you have disconnected data. It's difficult as you're a growing business. And as you mentioned, as these pyramids are getting further and further apart, as you said, tolerance for inaccuracy becomes quite low. More importantly, I'm also guessing that you get frustration from people who aren't able to as quickly and as easily do their job.

Absolutely true. And it becomes more and more difficult. When I mentioned before the. The dilution of skill set, it's kind of a fuzzy topic, but things become more complicated and it gets harder to get access to that data. You have to go to that expert where it's really hard to provide information, not just data or a report, but information to people in a format that they can manipulate themselves and really come to answers to take action. Because if they're not taking action on it, not really doing anything right, Those are the two main pain points we're looking to solve.

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Max, for articulating that. I would love to hear about, you know, moving down the road from that. You know, why wave analytics? You know, why did you choose wave analytics as opposed to other solutions out there? I would love to hear about some of the.

Sure, no problem. So I'll start with saying that I've used a lot of tools, a lot of analytics tools. I'm not going to name all of them, but chances are if you're using one now, you're thinking about using one, thinking about maybe even jettisong one. I probably tried it at one point or another. Whether it's a package solution that's a full BI suite or something that's custom built, homegrown and staffed with people instead of technology or something in between, I probably tried it at one point and out of all that experience, it's really hard to hit on all the cylinders. In this case, I'm referencing the three on the slide. Scale, speed and ease of use. Those are really difficult to do all and do all well. We have a lot of data and we want to connect to all of it from our CRM, our erp, our hrm, pbx, our licensing systems, our phone home data from our appliances and from our software installations in the field to our web activity. That's a lot of data and it's hard to connect to all of it in one spot, generally speaking. And it's not just about volume, it's also about future needs. When I say scale, I don't just mean size, I mean breadth. You have to think about what are the future needs going to be in my position, in my role, that building and supporting scalable infrastructure, that scale means not just the volume, but it means what else? What next? And you have to answer that question, well, why didn't you think of that? Why didn't you think ahead of what we're going to need in the future? And that's really what scalability to me is, is that you're investing forward, you're thinking ahead of the curve, you're thinking about what is going to be the next thing you're going to need in the future and you get it there in place beforehand. And the next on the list really probably should be number one because it's the number one technology requirement is speed. So everything's got to be fast nowadays. And slow refreshes, pinwheels are adoption killers. I've seen that firsthand, where if it's not fast enough, people just aren't going to use it. And it kind of ruins the moment too, if we're talking about it like that demonstration was perfect before. Just how quickly somebody can go through and get answers and drill into detail. It's at the speed of conversation, which is important because it's all about conversations. It's all about taking action, talking about the data, not just reporting it and emailing it to somebody.

And so I'm actually going to double click on this. You mentioned two aspects. You talked about scale and that's really being able to connect to all of the data that you have. And at unitrans you guys have a lot of data and then also speed. And it really felt like there were two separate avenues with speed. The first was that speed to insight, that ability to ask questions and get answers with the speed that we expect in our personal lives when we're doing Google search. And then there's the speed of being up and running quickly and being able to be in the cloud and not have to build your own solution, build your own data warehouse, build your own hardware and check it for compliance. Which of those for you is more provocative? Which do you think is more important? Or are they separate but equal?

Oh, that's a tough one. I think they're probably separate but equal. I mean you need to be able to get to value quickly and projects just die in the vine pretty quickly with analytics sometimes because they require a lot of resource that a lot of companies don't have dedication for. So I mean, being able to get up and running and out of the box. Well, like this for example, the sales Wave app is fantastic and is absolutely a requirement. But a lot of companies probably more resonate with the, you know, getting the data faster because that's just a pain point that everyone's normally looking, hey, why isn't this refreshing? What's taking so long? You can't have that conversation if the data is, you know, you're crunching hundreds of thousands of rows while staring at somebody, you know, blank faced across the table. So they're close. But I would say the first.

Cool. And then, Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I think you were onto your third reason around ease of use.

Yeah, ease of use is, I think I covered it already a little bit with that dilution of skill set. But it just really needs to be simple, which is really tough to crack because there's a lot of experts out there, there's a lot of people that know how to crunch numbers. And unfortunately in most cases those people are not the same people that are decision makers and folks that are talking to the customers and taking action to benefit the organization, benefit the customer's experience, but benefit the partner's experience, etc. But so that's a delta that needs to be fixed. And so that's a really, really Important piece that people that are actually should be servicing the reports and the information and taking action, they are able to utilize the tool with ease.

Yeah. So all good reasons. We love hearing that. Scale, speed, ease of use. And those are really the things that we wanted to build this platform for. And I think especially like within that, within all of these, I think of mobility. You can't be hamstrung by the device that you're using. It has to be device agnostic and built for those. So very exciting that you made this choice. We're grateful to have deemed the trends of the customer, but I think for us what's important is understanding what it is that you all are using WAVE for. What are some of the use cases? Because I think for the customers or for the prospects or for the folks that are attending this webinar, we definitely want to inspire them with some ideas and best practices. So what are you guys using it for at Unicorns?

That's a really good point. And this slide here has a couple bullets on it, but predominantly it's that sales and marketing alignment, which is sometimes easy to grasp when you're at that small pyramid level, but when you get to the larger one, it's a lot more difficult to manage. I actually just came out of a meeting with our sales and marketing executive leadership and I also had a sidebar meeting with the VP of marketing talking about this, where it's important that we have that single version of the truth that we are spending less time talking about the numbers and why some of the numbers. Why do my own numbers not add up to your numbers? What does that mean?

Right.

And really get to the real topic at hand, which is what are we doing? What are we doing that's working? What are we doing that's not working? Maybe we have some disconnects we need to handle. What should we be doing more of? And those should be the topics of those types of meetings, which they predominantly are. But there's always some type of an aside where you're maybe talking about some information or some numbers that it wouldn't be there with a more comprehensive and organized solution. That's really where we're looking to use, and we're currently using it, but looking to use it more to bring these teams together so when they're talking about numbers and talking about reports, they're not sitting there discussing them and the differences they're actually going through and talking about what to do next.

Awesome.

The next one is just as important. And I'll kick back to that customer obsessed Which I mentioned during my intro. Support is hugely important to our organization. We are so critical of ourselves and how we treat our customer because at the end of the day, that's really what's important. It's important is the happiness of the people that we're servicing and offering our goods to. And we invest heavily in that part of the organization. It's more than half of our company as our support organization and my staff internally, we spend more than half our time developing tools and solutions for a support organization. Now that isn't leaving sales out because it's an ecosystem where the support organization, we're looking to build almost a network operations center for our customers. What they're doing and how they're interacting with our products, not just from a transaction level. Oh, did you order your renewal this month? Or did you order this new appliance or new software? But have you visited the website in a particular fashion? Are you utilizing all of the features that we sold you? Bringing those qualitative matters together, it really creates a matrix of health that we're looking to implement in the support organization, which then feeds into sales and that ties back to the activity base or the ability to take action because you just have a dashboard that's great, but are you going to do anything with it? And giving people the power from their report that they're looking at to monitor that kind of a health level, giving.

Them the ability to take action and.

Maybe assign a task to a rep to follow up with an account, they're seeing indications of maybe wavering usage. That's powerful and that's the differentiator companies need in competitive space that we're in. The last one is sales and. I'm sorry, did you want to say something?

No, I mean, I think that that's really cool. That second use case about turning customer relationships into one, particularly in a retention business, into ongoing sales and sales into better service. We have, I think, especially for companies like yours, but really in all companies that are becoming software companies that are building mobile apps or trying to connect with their customers through a digital interface, through a website, it's important to get a sense of what the patterns are and what the trends are so you can provide better service and sell better and be more effective at marketing, there's huge opportunity. This is really the big data opportunity that we keep hearing about. Brought to life and impacting things that maybe weren't traditionally considered to be big data driven things like sales. So I think this is just super cool that you guys are doing.

Yeah, the mobile app is a really good point, and I haven't really touched on that. Unbelievably powerful to be able to do that on your mobile device. Especially for executives who are not necessarily always sitting by their machine, that they're traveling across the country. Being able to have access to that level of data across erp, CRM, all across the entire company is something that's really impressive. And the amount of speed to value there is incredible.

For sure. Awesome. And I think there's the one we had spoken about this yesterday, Max, but I think it's that sort of feedback loop between the sales teams and the product teams that you had mentioned. I'd love to hear about that again.

Sure, no problem. So the one thing that we've always had a difficult time with as a company is reporting by product. And that might be something that not everyone understands or maybe not even able to resonate with them, but it was just based on how we did run our business. It wasn't providing that feedback loop into Salesforce directly. It required manipulation of data outside the system. So it wasn't something we could easily transmit the information back to the product management group so that they could take action and to drive change in the organization. As far as maybe what particular products that are discounting more or less, what products are being offered together in areas where they should or should not be, et cetera. There's a million different ways you can slice and dice your product, transaction level detail, but it's not always easy to do. And the Wave application has allowed us to do that. Where we previously had a data warehouse scenario where you have massive spreadsheets and saving things to SharePoint or wherever else that you can share the information is very unwieldy and cumbersome. With the Wave analytics platform, I'm able to push an update to this data set and the folks that don't necessarily have all the skills necessary to access information from say like a OLAP Cube environment or from a data warehouse now have this information at their fingertips, which allows them to start asking more questions than they may have asked before and investigating this information to make better decisions about which products we offer, which products we change price on, et cetera. So that was a really huge kind of a quick win that we had with the Wave analytics platform.

Awesome. And I think that we've probably got an audience with folks who are familiar with what an OLAP cube is, and an audience that might not be as familiar with what an OLAP cube is, but I think that what you're sharing is exactly that it's bringing analytics and data to people who by definition might not have been able to access it before because it was in a technology or in a tool that was maybe a little bit more sophisticated or sophisticated is not the right word. Maybe a little bit more challenging to use. So this is awesome. I think, Matt, you've shared a ton with us. You shared some of the challenges that you had at unitrends when it came to data and analytics. You shared why you chose WAVE and what you're doing. What else for the folks listening? What are some of the questions they should be asking themselves? What else should they be considering as they're going through this data journey at their own companies, whether it's for sales or for service or for marketing?

Sure, absolutely. I mean, the first thing I think people need to ask more often than they maybe used to, but is to what does your company need? What does the organization need? What are the people in the organization need for analytics? And really spending the time to think about that. Is mobile access important? Is the ability to get access to data live and manipulate it on your mobile device or tablet? Is that important to you? How important is actionable data? Does your business model require that? How self service or basically how self sufficient is your actual employee base? So are folks able to do that? Is that skill set diluted? Are we at the small pyramid or the big pyramid? Right. And you know, there's a number of different attributes around how much data you have and maybe how complex it is. It also is really important for you to just think about is your data all in one spot? Do you have it in a number of different areas? It's really disconnected. All those types of information is really important to get all that straightened out before you start thinking about a decision. Well, what kind of a solution are we looking for here?

Awesome, Max, thank you so much. I think you've given everyone a lot of food for thought and it's always a pleasure chatting with you and hopefully we'll see you at Dreamforce and be able to continue this conversation.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

And anytime, anytime. For everyone who's on the line, I think that we're going to get to Q and A, but I think that as Ramya showed everyone, the proof is really in the experience and in the pudding when it comes to using this product. And we definitely wanted all of our customers to be able to give it a try, take a look at it with their own data. And there are two ways to do that today. You can go to the Apple App Store and you can download the mobile app and that already has some data in there. That's dummy data. But what it allows you to do is experience the product and start drilling and expanding. And the next way that you can experience this product is if you visit the Wave analytics playground. So if you go to salesforce.com analytics playground, you will actually be brought to sort of a micro site playground experience where we walk you through a tutorial of the product, if that is what you are interested in. We show you some dashboards that have been made by some of our partners, one of our customers, Project 8, some dashboards that talk a little bit about the Salesforce Foundation. But I think what's most exciting is that in the web playground you can actually log into Salesforce and explore some of your Salesforce data using the Wave platform or upload a Google Sheet. Forgive me, not upload a Google sheet, explore a Google Sheet or explore data that might live in a CSV file. And you won't be uploading your data anywhere. It will still be locally stored on your computer in that experience. But it will give you a sense of how the product works. So those two things that we encourage everyone to do right now to get a sense of this product. And lastly, we're seeing a ton of great questions here and we'll just pick some that are relevant to the whole group and hopefully that will clarify some of the questions that you have. So the first one that I'm seeing here, Anna, if you don't mind elaborating, is is Wave analytics only for Salesforce data? Great question. So you can absolutely use Wave analytics for Salesforce data. There's a lot of advantages of the fact that it's built in the Salesforce cloud and all of the data that you have in Salesforce is natively integrated and explorable in Wave. But the beauty of Wave is not just about taking the data that lives in Salesforce and allowing you to do cross object analysis and historical trending and really fluid exploration. You can actually bring in data. And I think Max made this point the same way that they're doing at Unitrends, from your back office systems, from your ERP system, from your HR system, as well as from systems that are storing or collecting data that isn't necessarily necessarily structured. So if you think about data that lives in an ERP system or in a CRM system like Salesforce, it's stored in columns and rows. But so much of this big data revolution that we're looking at that can supercharge your sales and service is data that comes from your website, data that comes from mobile apps, data that comes from product usage. And you can actually explore that data alongside some of your structured CRM and ERP and HR data as well. So it's really data agnostic, it's for everything. Great question, great. Thanks so much Anna for elaborating on that. Another question that we have here is specifically on the difference or what's the difference really between sales wave and the wave platform. Great question. So the wave platform is what we launched at Dreamforce last year and the wave platform is again everything I mentioned earlier. You can get your data from Salesforce from other, other sources and it really has three critical layers. The top layer is the layer that's designed to be experienced by people. It's interactive, it allows for self service and it's mobile. The second layer underneath that is what we call the search based engine, which means that it's very, very fast and allows people to explore their data very quickly, unlike traditional BI platforms. And then of course it's all built on the cloud. So this is a platform that we delivered because we wanted our customers to start using it for all of their different use cases. But like most platforms, you can build on top of it. And so what SalesWave is, it is an analytics app that we deliver to our customers. And so with SalesWave you actually get data that is automatically pre populated from within Salesforce with pre built dashboards that we've created for specific use cases and best practices and KPIs. Whereas on the platform you can build your own app, you can build your own dashboard, you can explore your own data. With sales wave that already comes prepackaged. So it's this fast start kit when it comes to wave analytics, when it comes to turning it on, personalizing it and then actually seeing your data in dashboards, that becomes a very, very fast time to value somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hours rather than a few weeks or a few months. Great, thank you so much, Anna. And we have time for one more question here. And the question is, how is wave analytics different from reports and dashboards?

Great.

So I think for us the way we look at it is that Salesforce reports and dashboards and wave analytics are perfect match. They are there to make your data look good, to make everything explorable and to give you new insights. But really reports and dashboards is transactional operational reporting that comes within sales cloud, within service cloud, and basically for any app that you are building on the force dot com platform, you've already got it if you're a Salesforce customer and what Reports and dashboards was designed and built to do was to help people get the tactical updates that they needed. How am I performing against quota? Who is at the top of my leaderboard? How much do I have at each stage of the pipeline? Really, those metrics that you already know, what you're going to want to see, you can build them on your own and you get updates in real time. So that's really what reports and dashboards are designed to do, are to answer the question of how am I doing? Wave analytics extends your investment in Salesforce and really helps you answer questions about why you are performing in a certain way and what you should be doing next. So rather than having tactical reports that give you a snapshot of your business as it is today, with Wave analytics you can actually explore data in a very seamless way. You can interrogate the data, ask questions, and try and explore your Salesforce data along other types of data to uncover new insight about your business. For example, I think Max was sharing a really cool use case about being able to track customer usage of products and being able to also see how the engagement has changed and help that inform how customer service representatives are able to provide a better level of service alongside Salesforce data in cases and to uncover trends and spot new things. That's really what Wave analytics is designed to do.

Great.

Thank you so much Anna. And thank you everyone for tuning in here today. I hope this was an informative session for you all. And please, as Anna and I earlier mentioned, please check out the Salesforce analytics app in the Apple Store or visit the playground@salesforce.com and again, we hope that you found this session helpful. And thanks again for tuning in.