Salesforce boosts its Wave Analytics Cloud with new applications

Salesforce is adding new desktop/mobile applications to its Wave Analytics Cloud that allow users to drill down into data, customize dashboards, or better apply analytics to specific uses.

There is a Wave for B2B Marketing, currently in beta and available as a release version next month. It allows a marketer to drill down into data from B2B marketing platform Pardot, Salesforce customer relationship management, and external sources, such as event info from Eventbrite or website data from Google Analytics.

Also new: the ability to utilize pre-built dashboards designed for specific audiences, such as C-suite execs, or to create custom dashboards.

In a blog post on the announcement, Salesforce VP for Pardot Marketing Shannon Duffy visualized a typical use case for the new capabilities:

“…say a marketing leader dives into her Wave for B2B Marketing dashboard to check on the overall of pipeline generation. Right away, she notices in her pipeline by region chart that the Northeast is lagging compared to other regions. She takes a deeper look and can see that events aren’t generating as much pipeline as they should and realizes it could be because the team hasn’t conducted an event in Boston in the last quarter. She automatically sends her head of demand generation a Chatter message asking her to schedule an event in Boston, pulls a list from Salesforce of all of the top leads in the Boston area that fit the company’s demographic, and spins up a personalized campaign in Pardot to drive registration for the event.”

Previously, Duffy told me, a B2B marketer would have had to export the data into a spreadsheet or a business intelligence platform, there was only Pardot data, and users didn’t have the internal ability to create a custom dashboard.

A new Wave for Sales application enhances the analytics for sales reps and managers, with an emphasis on hitting quotas. The company said the new capabilities include alerts, conditional formatting, new business views with objects like Leads and Campaigns, and an emphasis on opportunities across accounts.

There are also two new applications to “supercharge customization” of sales dashboards and datasets in Wave, appropriately called Dashboard Designer and Dataset Designer. Dashboard Designer allows users to tailor analytics screens for specific viewers like sales supervisors, while Dataset Designer enables the connection of external data sources with a few clicks. For instance, a customer service manager might connect sensor data from online devices in order to track usage and preemptively become aware of any device issues.

Also announced: new applications from independent software vendors (ISVs) in the Salesforce AppExchange, including Everis, ThinkLP and Vlocity, for use in healthcare, inventory control, and contact center clickstream analysis.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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