OREANDA-NEWS. January 15, 2016. You can’t fix what you can’t see. That’s why managers aim for complete transparency across their teams and company.

We are in the golden age of data. It’s oozing out of our phones, computers, tablets, watches … everywhere. But with so much to look at, visibility is not the issue; it’s focus. Do managers understand what they are looking at enough to act on it?

Data is absolutely useless unless we can analyze and visualize it to map everything that’s going on in our companies.

Going deeper with Wave Analytics

NewVoiceMedia is a sales and service communications platform built on Salesforce that helps businesses better connect with their customers and deliver a unique and personalized customer experience. We built NVM on Salesforce App Cloud because the wealth of knowledge the platform offers enables our customers to drive more effective sales and marketing teams, and for years I’ve turned to Salesforce reports and dashboards for the same reason.

I manage a global team of sales engineers who support and drive the technical sales engagements with NewVoiceMedia. Salesforce reports and dashboards give me visibility into current activity, opportunities and our competitive capabilities, allowing me to create alignment across our global team. But now, with Wave Analytics, I can dive deeper into my team’s performance to uncover fast and actionable insights that help drive opportunity.

I wanted to go beyond the base data I was collecting for my teams and create a dynamic, holistic performance report across multiple datasets and drill into data to understand strengths and weaknesses compared across the team. I needed something that could extract information from multiple sources and then organize that information in a visual and comprehensive way.

Wave delivered.

I was able to instantly weed through the data jungle to discover focused and actionable insights. And because the Wave Platform is customizable, I was able to set up lenses and dashboards that reflected my specific operational needs. Suddenly I was armed with a holistic view of my team and the ability to take instant action directly in Salesforce.  

Simple, fast and accurate

It was astonishingly easy to achieve my goals. Wave provided me with both a high level overview of my business and the ability to  and uncover insights far beyond what I could have achieved with legacy tools.

And setting it up was a breeze! We started looking at the Salesforce Trailhead modules  for Wave and, without a large degree of technical expertise, it only took me and one of my teammates less than half a day to understand the mechanics, create datasets and lenses and fully replicate one of my dashboards, containing 20 components from 20 different reports.

Salesforce has always led the industry in transforming the way companies sell, serve and market, and its new Wave Analytics Cloud has provided me the perfect vantage point to evaluate my team and optimize their performance. I’m excited to continue using Wave as part of my operational cadence and expand its use to other departments within the business.