What is the Best Way to Visualize Data In Salesforce?
So you wanna visualize data in Salesforce huh?
Most enterprise organizations today use Salesforce for some areas of their business processes. Whether it's for customer resource management, case management, or marketing, the odds are that Salesforce exists in your company, and you have a login.
Having all this customer data can be daunting, and many executives have trouble understanding their data without some level of visualization. The trouble with this is that when it comes to visualizing your Salesforce data, there are so many options to explore.
Do you visualize it in the Salesforce platform, or take your data out and build everything in a third-party tool like Tableau or Power BI?
Do you connect your Salesforce data directly to the visualization platform of choice, or store it in an intermediary data warehouse like Snowflake, Azure, or Google?
What if you already have a visualization tool that your company has adopted? Or even more than one?
This post will explore these questions and help outline how a business should plan to effectively visualize Salesforce data.
Visualizing In Salesforce
Inside of Salesforce, the options for visualization are becoming more and more extensive. At the base level, a user has reports and dashboards available that allow them to create tables, bar charts, and KPIs based on object information. Reports have preset models that a user can select when creating a report that combines data from two or three standard objects.
Beyond basic reports and dashboards, Salesforce has invested in several data visualization products including CRM Analytics, Revenue Intelligence, Tableau Pulse, Marketing Cloud Intelligence, and more.
Tableau Pulse platform demo image from Salesforce.
These may look like a suite of different platforms but what is going on under the hood is that most are premade dashboards that Salesforce has configured as standalone products. For example, Revenue Intelligence and Tableau Pulse are basically CRM Analytics pre-made data models and dashboards. Marketing Cloud Intelligence is based on a platform that Salesforce purchased several years ago called Datorama.
If you are not careful you will end up buying multiple expensive products that can all be created using just one or two.
The most capable of the tools listed above is CRM Analytics, this is a platform that embeds natively into lightning pages, includes its own data modeling and integration platform called data manager that acts as a mini-data warehouse, and even has data science capabilities.
CRM Analytics embedded on a Salesforce Opportunity page with Einstein Scoring enabled.
The platform is powerful but so is its price tag. Users at the time of this article are priced at $140 per user per month for a license which is way more than any other visualization platform on the market (Tableau is at $75). So if you have a large enterprise organization with 500 users that need a license, this price can get ridiculously high.
Going with a Salesforce native tool is best utilized by either sticking to standard Reports and Dashboards or biting the bullet and going with CRM Analytics. The tool is extensive and comes with some serious integration capabilities. Just be prepared to hire an excellent services partner that knows the tool inside and out (like Lakefront) or hire for a role internally that can maintain the tool.
Visualizing In Third Party Tools
One option for Salesforce data visualization is to take the data outside the tool and visualize it in a platform like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker. All of these have similar capabilities when it comes to data visualization. They offer desktop and cloud versions of the tool that allow you to either download a report and data model or login to a web based browser and view a shared report there.
One challenge that clients face when going this route is latency, the data takes time to update in the third-party system before it can be consumed. This makes business processes that are time sensitive a difficult choice for this type of solution. Another issue is the two-window problem. Clients don’t want to be logged into Salesforce in one window and then have to switch to another to review their sales pipeline, it seems simple but this issue has come up time and again when discussing challenges in data visualization setups like this with clients.
A benefit of using third-party tools is the ability to integrate other data sources with Salesforce data for reporting. For example, a Sales & Marketing report can have ad spend metrics integrated alongside sales numbers to show the return on ad spend. There are internal tools that can do this as well, but they are limited by what is available for integration.
Another benefit is that third-party visualization platforms have way more customization capabilities than standard out-of-the-box Salesforce reports and dashboards, so teams can get creative with branding and presentation of data.
Overall, taking data out of Salesforce and visualizing it in a third-party tool can be a great solution for managers and executives who don't have extremely time-sensitive analytics and don’t mind logging into another application to view their reports.
TIP: If your business plans to go the third-party route, discuss building out a data model specific to reporting that is housed in a data warehouse tool such as Snowflake or AWS. Modeled data often performs faster when preprocessed outside of the visualization platform and allows for more complex KPI calculations in reports.
Embedding Third Parties In the Platform
The last option for discussion is to embed visuals from your platform of choice into Salesforce on a lightning page. This can be a cost-effective way to conquer the two-window problem while keeping costs out of the stratosphere.
Embedding inside Salesforce is easier for some platforms over others. For example, Tableau is a Salesforce product, so naturally they have native components for embedding Tableau dashboards on Salesforce pages. If your organization uses Power BI, embedding a dashboard becomes a more complicated process. Because Power BI is a Microsoft product, Salesforce does not allow native embedding, and most solutions currently use Aura Components to embed dashboards. This often needs a larger internal team to support and maintain and doesn't come with all of the bells and whistles that other options give you like record-level security predicates based on logged-in users.
This route is typically best utilized if your organization is utilizing Tableau and doesn't want to retrain a legion of analysts on a new product. Using the Tableau native components puts the burden of maintenance on Salesforce in case anything goes wrong and reduces the large retraining headache that comes with new product adoption.
Closing Thoughts on Salesforce Visualization
At the end of the day, if you asked me what visualization strategy is best, I would give you a classic consultant answer “It depends”.
If you are a Tableau shop that has a bunch of Tableau developers and a decent Salesforce admin team, go the embedded Tableau route.
If you don’t have any existing visualization platforms and need something natively integrated for speed and ease-of-use and money is no object, buy CRM Analytics.
If you're a smaller business that has several platforms you want to collect data from to visualize and Salesforce is just one piece of that ecosystem, go with a cost-effective visualization tool like Power BI (currently starting at $12 per user per month) or even something free like Looker Studio. Just be aware that in those scenarios, you get what you pay for. I am at the time of writing this, in a war with Microsoft support over Power BI dashboard errors.
The great news is if you do not want to figure this problem out on your own, we are here to help!
Contact Lakefront today to see how our professional services can help plan and execute your Salesforce visualization needs.
