Analytics and BI for SalesLogix

Sam. Good morning everyone. This is Gianni Girardi, founder and CEO of Data Self. Thanks for joining us today. Happy Tuesday. We're going to have informative and exciting session About analytics and BI for SalesLogix. Half an hour session. Before we jump into the presentation, I want to give you a quick overview of why I founded this business and what the vision of the company is. So I'm an electric engineer. As my background and in my early career I was a programmer for many years. Eventually I fell in love with the business area. I had my MBA and I became a business person. And for me, reporting data analysis was never really an issue because I'm a programmer, I can take tools, I can go to databases and just do it. I was comfortable. But my peers, business people, peers, that would not be the same thing. They would have difficulties. They would have to call a consultant, an Ito or call me to help them with their own reporting needs. So I joined the BI industry back in the year 2000, 14 years ago because I thought that I could help and I was intrigued by how we could help business people get better data out of it. In 2005 I decided to start Data Cell BI and the vision of the company was there are great tools out there and my focus was midsize companies. So there are great tools out there, but usually they come from the upper market and they're usually too expensive for midsize companies and too complicated to install and set up and even get trained. So my vision was, well, I think I can actually find tools in the upper market that are a good fit for the mid market, price wise, functionality wise. I want to make them better, I want to make them simple. So the vision was simplify and amplify top notch technology from the upper market for mid sized companies. So that was the vision of the company back in 2005. We came a long way in. What you're going to be seeing here today is the latest and greatest and I hope you enjoy the session. Just before we get started, all lines are muted and if you have questions throughout the session or at the end, Please use the GoToMeeting panel. The chat inbox. Ask questions and we're going to be addressing them at the end of the presentation. Let's do it. So I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about why analytics and why us and then a quick demo about the product and then we're going to open a Q and A session. So why people look for analytics when looking at sales logics? Well, one of the most important Needs is just doing a better management of the opportunity in your pipeline. Looking what's open, what's been closing, who's closing, what's the ratio between closing and opening, is it taking longer or not? So having a good grasp of analyzing your opportunities is a big topic and analytics can provide big value for that. Also campaign management, if you're calling people, meeting people, you want to see how effective they are. Analytics can provide many ways to slice and dice your data to have better insights of what campaigns, what part of the campaigns are working well and where you can improve. Tickets management. If you do tech support through your sales logics area, that can be very important and you have to be on top of where the problems are, how long it's taking to fix them, who's been more effective fixing them, what kind of recurring problems you're having, maybe that you have to change your procedures. Many things can happen in the ticket area that analytics can help you analyze. So people come to us often when they also try to improve their ticket management. Just, you know, sales logics a lot of the times is associated with sales team and having a good understanding of sales profitability, you know, to whom are you selling to? Is it growing or declining? Salespeople effectiveness Profitability now often when we combine is because we're bringing profitability or cost of sales from the ERP package. But we can combine the data and then you can have a pretty good understanding and insights into your sales and profitability. Sales commission if you are doing sales commission today and you may be spending too much time at the end of the month or the period to come up with the commissions, sometimes a time consuming job using Excel error prone process analytics can actually pretty much automate the whole process. Most of the time 100%. Then any time of the month you can see where things are, how you're going towards your goal. So it removes the labor intensive part of the equation and also the error prone. It's pretty much all done automatically by the analytics component. Finally, as I mentioned, sometimes when you're analyzing your sales logics data, you may want to combine data with other packages. The most common way is looking with your ERP package and combined with your sales logic so you can see let's say profitability, cost of sales and bring invoice number, you name it. So combining data from erp, Excel files and other places is really important and sometimes analytics can provide a lot of value in that regard. So this is a very quick slide, but it's very important because it goes back to the vision of the company when I found it. So this is Gartner, Magic Quadrant. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing assessment of technology in the upper market. And every year in February they release a study of BI and analytics platforms and how they're doing in the upper market. So here if you look on the X axis, being more to the right is usually good for Fortune 2000 companies. So not so important for mid sized companies. But more to the, on the Y axis, more to the up here, the better the company is executing whatever their vision is or their products are. So these two vendors that I highlighted, you know, Tableau and Microsoft, right now they are considered the best providers, the leaders. Tableau is considered the king of the hill when it comes to dashboarding capabilities, ease of use, very focused on business users and Microsoft is considered the leader for BI infrastructure. So what about them, what about us? Well, it goes back to my vision. When I started the business, I thought that I could find in the upper market, top of the best of the technology, make it simpler, make it better. So what we have here today with DataStar analytics is I take the best provider of dashboard and capabilities, which is Tableau. I take the best provider of BI infrastructure available, pretty much. And then I add my own technology that eliminates programming from this platform. So, so it's easier, simplified. And then we add more than 2,000 reports and dashboards out of the box. So we make it better, we amplify it. So that's what we do. We go out, we find the best providers, we simplify it, we amplify it. We have been working with SQL Server for forever since we started the business in Tableau. We have incorporated it for about two years and a half now. So it's an outstanding platform. Really excited, really happy. Our clients also. So next slide about us so in a nutshell, why us? Again, top notch technology, simplified because of the ETL or extraction transformation loading technology and amplified by the out of the box solution. Can you do it yourself these things? Absolutely. However, what you get from us, first of all is the best of the breed technologies. Very easy to use for business people, anytime, anywhere. They can see their dashboards, they can slice and dice, drill down on their desktop, web and mobile devices for it. Also it's easy because we use very well documented, very solid platform. So easy for it, easy for business people. It's fast to deploy, usually takes hours or days to deploy in comparison to the competition. If you try to build the same thing, it's going to take usually months or years. So speed of deployment is a big value. We provide expertise. The core team of Data self, we've been working with mid market companies, CRMs like SalesLogix and Sales CRM and others for 14 years. So we know the CRM system, we know the BI package, we know how to interconnect them and we know how to work with mid sized companies like yourselves to make this package really helpful and valuable from the get going. So expertise you also get when you acquire data self analytics. And finally low cost. I mean if you build a solution from scratch, it's probably going to take you months to years. Most likely it's going to cost you into the six figures. Cost is a lot lower, it's a fraction of that cost. So that's our value in a nutshell. And because we use best of breed components, we compare our technology like a Ferrari. So among the mid market BI vendors, our solutions like a Ferrari. The other guys, they're like the bimmers, the Mercedes, the Porsches, good solutions, good pricing but they, they're not the faster, they're not the nicer one. But ours does not cost a Ferrari, it's more like a Toyota, it costs even less. So let's go for test drive. We're going to break this presentation in three modules. I'm going to talk a little bit about the secure access to the framework. Then I'm going to show some sample KPIs out of the 2000 reports pre configured and then we're going to do an ad hoc analysis. So let's have a seat at your passenger seat, buckle up and let's have some fun here. All right, so now I'm switching to the actual portal. Most people, most business users will access their reports and dashboards through a web portal using a desktop, web or mobile device such as a tablet or a smartphone. It's a highly secure portal. It can be behind your firewall or it can be, let's say in the cloud. Anyway, when you log into the portal you're going to only have access to your own dashboards, to your team's dashboard. So if you are a salesperson, for instance, you would see the sales team dashboard. If you are a person from the tech support team, you would only see the tech support team dashboards. So it's user sensitive to your user credentials. Now when I open one of these dashboards, let's say I'm going to open my top customer by sales dashboard, then I can have another layer of security kicking in. If I'm the rep for California And I open this dashboard which is the same for the whole team. It would only show me, let's say the top customers in California, while the rep in Florida opens the same dashboard and views the top customers in Florida, while the big boss opens the same dashboard and views the top customers across all territories. So security can be set up in a way that is user sensitive. Same dashboard, many different people, and they see their own information. So that's how security works. It's pretty straightforward and pretty secure. Now let me talk a little bit about the reports that comes pre configured out of the box. And as I mentioned, we have more than 2,000. If you have a complete solution. When we build those dashboards and reports, we make them insightful. We try to make them simple and insightful. In this example, actually it's an example that combines actual sales from sales logics along with a gross profit that if you do not have in sales logics would be coming from let's say your ERP package. The point is here we have here my top accounts, my top customers, and they have each one a bar. The bigger the bar, the bigger the actual sales. And then the color of the bar relates to this color theme here. So not so profitable to very profitable. So just by looking at these bars and colors I can tell that some of my top customers are fairly unprofitable and maybe I need to work more closely with that opportunity or those accounts to increase profitability. Profitability is also shown on this axis using the black dots. So it's a simple insight. Typically business people, salespeople, you name it, they look at this once they view this kind of information the first time, next time they'll be very effective capturing the meaning of this dashboard. Insightful. They can move on to doing their stuff, not spending time trying to figure out how things are going. And we have ton of reports showing what we call top performers, like top actual sales potential, sales ratios, quantities and you name it. Now sometimes an even more intriguing type of report is looking at the tip of the growth curve of your major key performance indicators. This is a very simple example. So I'm looking at the top customers by sales change since last year to date. So bigger bars, bigger sales increase, bigger bars going down as bigger sales decrease. So what happens here? Most likely the top growth, they're happy customers, salespeople working closely with them, no problems perhaps. So for this dashboard, maybe that's not so insightful, but how about the customers declining the most in sales? If you do have recurring customers, you better pay attention to the ones who are declining the most because maybe they're not happy, maybe you're doing something wrong, maybe the competition is taking them away. So keeping track of the tip of the growth curve of any of your key performance indicators is critical. And we have lots of reports looking at those perspectives to help you focus on what matters the most. Let me show some other examples and then we're going to go into some ad hoc analysis here. Opportunity by geography. So here we have a map showing bubbles, bigger bubbles, bigger potential sales. And then they are sliced by the certainty, close probability of your opportunities. You also have here your account managers also showing a color schema comparing to the potential sales. And also you have the actual accounts in this whole dashboard. And this whole thing is very informative. If you select an area, it would automatically highlight and show which account managers are working and what opportunities are being covered in that particular segment. Anyway, I'm going to show only one more example of preconfigured report and then I'm going to start doing some extensive ad hoc analysis here. So this is another way looking, let's see at actual sales. So actual sales, I see bubbles, sales by state on a map. And again, bigger bubbles, bigger sales. And in this case I'm slicing the bubbles by the size of the deals. So large deals, in this case over $10,000 are in blue, medium and small. I can quickly change and see if things are changing over time. You know, are the bubbles growing over the years? Are the slices, let's say the blue slices growing? Because I want to make bigger deals. So very insightful. I could use this to slice by year, by quarter, by month, fiscal period, you name it. And I also have here the account managers, I have sales looking, you know, you click in the bars and also have the color schema for the profitability and then what products have been shipped. Now if I'm the big boss and I have access to this whole dashboard, it's beautiful. Maybe on my iPad and if I'm meeting with the west coast team and I only see west coast information, I could use my fingers on the iPad and select those three states. And when I do that, the whole dashboard changes. Right now it's showing salespeople selling to those three states and what product has been shipped. Maybe I only want to further drill down, let's say I want to select only my top salesperson or account manager. When I do that, I change it again. So now the legend has changed and it's showing what Sam is selling those three states and what products among the top ones he's been shipping. So very dynamic business people with little training, sometimes no training, they can take these dashboards on their web mobile devices and make these changes with little or no training. They can also come here, let's say they're looking at a dashboard and assume that they want to take this data here and download it to, let's say an Excel. Well, they can come here, click the, the View Data button and then they can see the underlying data. They can cut all columns and this would have, you know, if you're looking at the opportunity, we have opportunity ID and dates. If you're looking at invoice, would have invoice number and everything. Then you can download that goes into Excel, even if you have all the records and you have into Excel. And now you can further, you know, analyze the data if you want to, using Excel. So easy ways to access the data, easy ways to slice and dice it. Now, if I'm a power user and I want to have full capabilities to slice and dice on the fly, even on my mobile devices, then I would have the Edit button. The Edit button is only for power users. However, we have many business people, such as the company owner, the CEO, CFOs, VP of sales, that are power users. And they're doing what I'm going to show next, which is extensively changing a query from scratch. But before I show it to you, let me tell a story here. The engine behind this tool, this user interface, was designed by Stanford University professors. These professors, they studied how business people look at business data and have insights from it. And this process, it's a journey. It's a process. They often, they have an idea of what they want to view, but until they start seeing something, they just don't know. And that's why when they ask for a report to another person, like a consultant, give them a report like this, the person goes, comes back and the guy, well, good job, but can you please change it here, put a filter there, summarize there, then goes again, comes back with the revised report. Oh, can you put a chart, change the color. It's a process. It is what it is. It's a journey. So the business person has to interact with the data until they have the right insight. So these Stanford University professors, they studied this process and they created this software engine that automates part of the process and helps decision makers walk through the journey with no assistant from it. So they can do it. So let's see how it works. So when I click the Edit button, I got into this page here and Now I have one tab for each quadrant of my dashboard. And then assume I would like to take this dashboard here and I want to just see numbers. You know, I'm an accountant and I like seeing numbers by the penny. Well, I click the show me button and I can select what kind of graphical representation I'm going to choose. In this case, I'm going to choose just grid. I want to see numbers by the penny. There they are. Very cool. Okay. But hey, I'd like to slice the sales by let's say another component, product, family. You name it, you just go to the list of reporting parameters, you find what you want to have. This is a sample database. So it's generic, not necessarily to sales logic, but you go here. Let's say you find product line, which could be the product family, let's say from SalesLogix. You can drag and drop into the report very easily with your fingers on the iPad. Drag and drop, there it is. By salesperson, by product line. In this case, sales and gross profit. Easy. What if I want to break down by account customer? You know, same idea, go there, just drag and drop. Maybe at the beginning between the two or at the end gonna put between the two. So by salesperson, buy, customer, buy product line. Maybe you wanna break the actual dates. Just drag and drop. And there it is, you have the dates. So it's a very easy to use tool. It's designed for business people more on average, based on our track record, more than 70% of the reporting needs of the average business user, they can do it. So you offload those from it and they, the business people, the decision makers can do it on the fly. So that's pretty much our ride in our Ferrari. I hope you have enjoyed it. Let's go back to our PowerPoint and move on here. So let's open the Q and A session. We have about four minutes to go. If you have questions, please. I hope you have used the GoToMeeting panel. If you haven't done so yet, just go there and type in your question and we'll answer them. So let me see here if you have any questions. Yep, we have a question here. Question from Carl. Thank you. Carl. Can your solution combine data with Sage 500? Carl, thank you for your question. Absolutely. Actually, let me just change here. My PowerPoint, you talk about data integration, it's a pretty popular question. Oops, I don't have it here. So let me go to my website to answer your question. So this is our website, dataself.com first of all, if you go to dataself.com and go to the analytics by product, these are all the products that we connect to. So we do have connect to Sage 500 with lots of reports ready to go and we have combined templates, Sage 500 and SalesLogix. Absolutely. So we do have and we love to talk with you about it. If you come and click let's say the SalesLogix product here later today or tomorrow, this particular link is going to show a recording of this session. So if you want to review what we covered you can come back here or forward to other people to take a look. So wait for email telling that the recording has been uploaded. But we also have several other pieces of information that may be helpful such as brochure, sample KPIs and so forth. Also I want to show you the software architecture. So what we do is we bring data from SalesLogix into what is called an ultralight data warehouse, which is a SQL Server database. And we do this process using our etl. So it's pretty much code free most of the time. We can bring from ERP CRM out of the box. We have a lot of things covered. We make this data really easy and fast for reporting. We plug the in memory analytics component which can be on premises or in the cloud and at the end of the day business users can access information through web, desktop and mobile devices. Carl, good question. Thank you. Let's see if we have more questions. We have a few more questions here. One of the questions is okay, there's one question here is how do I get trained on this product? Jun, thanks for your question. How do I get trained from this product? Training. There are mainly three ways to go. We usually have web based live training, one on one for your team to get the ball rolling. And then quite often people get going using our learning. You know we have plenty of training videos. There are actually dozens and dozens of training videos available. This is a subsection of the whole set. So many people they actually learn how to use the product, just self serve you, you know anytime they pop the videos and they watched it. But we provide also web based instructor led training to get the ball rolling more quickly. And finally there's no documentation. So pretty much those three ways are the ways to learn the product. Jun, thanks for your question. We have more questions. I'm going to address one more question and then we're going to wrap it. Question from Brian. Thank you Brian for the question, pricing and partner information. So Brian, we will circle back to you to give you price information and talk about partner program overall. What I can tell is if you are familiar with sales logics. Even if you have to consider advanced analytics, our pricing, it's in the ballpark. Figure we provide more functionality so it's pricier then advanced analytics, not much but it's pricier but there's a lot more value. So usually pricing is not really a big deal as long as we provide the roi. So Brian, we'll circle back with you and then we'll talk in more detail. Well folks, I much appreciated your time today. I know time is precious. It's 9:30. Here's my contact information, my cell phone, my email, my Twitter account. If you could follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, we're always getting out with some news. I hope you have a wonderful Tuesday and I look forward to reconnect with you in the near future. Thank you very much. Have a good one.