Drive Revenue by Using Sigma with Salesforce

Salesforce is both a valuable data source and a central tool for sales teams.  More than just a CRM, Salesforce provides the underlying data for analysis on pipeline, revenue, productivity and more.  It is also a hub where account executives, sales leaders and operations teams do lots of their daily work.  But too often, sales teams don't have live access to all the Salesforce data tables in an analysis platform.  Or, other relevant information like customer health and product usage data isn't accessible in Salesforce, making it harder for sellers to identify churn risk or upsell opportunities.

Sigma is the solution to both problems: First, it allows sales teams to analyze Salesforce data directly, eliminating the back-and-forth cycle with data teams. Second, Sigma's dynamic dashboards can be embedded in Salesforce, allowing drill-down and ad-hoc exploration of useful external data in the sales workspace.  Sigma is how you supercharge Salesforce to save time and drive revenue.

Territory Planning with Sigma

Take a traditional territory planning workflow as an example of the disconnect between sales leaders and their data.  Anna, a regional sales manager, is tasked with increasing revenue by ten percent, and plans to hire a dozen people to achieve that.  Deciding how to place these heads is a challenge, so Anna asks the operations analyst, Dave, for a breakdown of salesperson productivity by territory over the past few quarters.  

Dave gets the data back to Anna a few days later, but then realizes she also wants to see it broken down by business segment.  She asks Dave for another extract, waits, analyzes it and then wants to look at net dollar retention as well.  The cycle drags on, until Anna has the data she needs to make a decision.  This workflow is broken: Anna is delayed in making a decision that will impact her yearly performance and Dave is burdened with request after request.

Sigma solves this problem by giving users an analysis platform where they can access live Salesforce data in a spreadsheet-like interface.  This enables decision makers to answer questions themselves, without relying heavily on other teams.   Using Sigma, Dave can build a workbook for Anna that pivots the productivity data by region on top of Salesforce tables stored in the cloud.  From there, Anna can drill down to any degree of granularity and add metrics as needed to answer her initial question.  Dave's workload is reduced, Anna quickly gets the exact answers she wants and the analysis can be improved in the future.

Embedding Sigma in Salesforce

Sigma can also be used to present customer-related data from external sources by embedding a Sigma dashboard in Salesforce.  Any account executive selling a product wants to know how much their customer is using that product in order to identify an upsell opportunity or a risk of churn.

Continuing with the previous example, suppose that Lex, a sales representative reporting to Anna, has a customer up for renewal in 2 months.  Lex wants to understand the account's status, so they visit the account record in Salesforce, where there is an embedded Sigma dashboard that details account health.  The dynamic text in the dashboard tells Lex that there is an upsell opportunity of $3,000.  Traditionally, this customer health data might live in some other business intelligence tool that sellers have no access to and therefore cannot use to efficiently drive revenue.  With Sigma's ability to analyze complex product usage data, leverage existing Salesforce authentication and create iFrame embeddings, the effort required to deliver this is minimal.

Using Sigma to Run a Presentation on Salesforce Data

Another great way to use Sigma on top of Salesforce data is as a presentation vehicle.  Anyone who has done a sales performance review, where each salesperson prepares a slide deck detailing their quarterly results, knows how time consuming that process can be.  Account executives like Lex have to figure out how much business they closed last quarter or how much pipeline they generated for this quarter and then build a slide deck, which takes up valuable time they would otherwise spend selling.  Multiply 3 hours out across each of Anna's 100 reps for 4 presentations annually, then consider the revenue lost in those 1,200 hours of deck-building.  Sales operations teams are equally pained by this process: they have to field dozens of requests from salespeople, drawing them away from important work like territory planning.

Sigma solves both issues simultaneously: the sales operations team can build one workbook and create a Template out of it, standardizing calculations and metrics to provide a consistent, error-free performance review.  Salespeople like Lex can then create a copy from the template, filter to their own opportunities and accounts and add information as needed.  This workbook then becomes the presentation, leveraging Sigma's dynamic text, pivot tables and other visualizations built on live Salesforce data.  No more updating slide decks or asking the operations team for help.

Salesforce Performance Template

For a more holistic view of sales performance, pipeline and lead generation, Sigma's Salesforce Performance template offers an out-of-the-box solution.  It's a prebuilt dashboard that analyzes Salesforce account, opportunity and campaign data, providing a strong starting point for understanding the sales and marketing landscape.  This template is just a foundation; it can easily be enriched with non-Salesforce data like quota amounts, prospect scoring or customer usage data.  Building a holistic dashboard off of the Salesforce Performance template puts data in the hands of the sales teams who use it most, reducing back-and-forth between tools and giving sellers more time to sell.  

Using Sigma and Salesforce together helps sales teams increase revenue by putting data in front of the people who need it and saving sellers time.  Sales leaders and their analysts can build dynamic headcount planning models on top of live Salesforce data, reducing the latency between initial questions and revenue-impacting decisions.  Upsell opportunities can be presented clearly to account executives, reducing lost revenue.  And those quarterly performance presentations can be built just once for the entire team, letting sellers focus on selling and analysts focus on larger projects.  To see how Sigma can increase your top line, sign up for a free trial today!