Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world’s #1 CRM company, today introduced Wave Analytics Apps, a new generation of role-specific analytics apps that empower business users with the insight to take action, instantly. The inaugural app, Sales Wave Analytics, will deliver personalized templates, historical analysis and the ability to take immediate actions, helping sales leaders accelerate revenue growth.

The ability to derive insights from large amounts of data, and then immediately take action, is interwoven in today’s most popular consumer apps. For example, travel analytics apps like Kayak not only allow consumers to search and filter nearly 40 million annual commercial flights in seconds, it also allows them to book their preferred flight instantly. Similarly, in addition to providing driving directions and optimal routes for a destination based on real-time traffic, Google Maps also delivers turn-by-turn navigation while a person is driving.

Unfortunately, actionable insight is an oxymoron for most business apps. Legacy analytics software is disconnected from both relevant data feeds and the point of action, preventing companies from keeping pace with the speed at which business decisions must be made today.

Wave Analytics Apps — Delivering the Insights to Take Action, Instantly
Salesforce launched Analytics Cloud, powered by the Wave Platform, to reimagine the entire analytics process end-to-end, and empower business users to explore any data and uncover new insights from any device. And now, with Wave Analytics Apps, Salesforce will expand its Analytics Cloud portfolio to deliver analytics apps that are built to deliver intelligence, business context and instant action. Wave Analytics Apps will include:

  • Accelerator Templates: Based on years of experience in delivering CRM solutions and working with companies to transform every customer interaction, Salesforce is developing role-specific accelerator templates for each Wave Analytics App that can be customized for each business. Wave Analytics Apps will instantly populate CRM data into these templates, so users are up and running in minutes. Bringing together the best practices, KPIs and metrics that every department needs to track makes it easy for business leaders to take the pulse of their team’s performance at any moment and move their business forward faster.
  • Historical Analysis: The smartest decisions are made based on an understanding of both the current health and past performance of the business. Wave Analytics Apps will instantly surface historical trends and year-over-year comparisons from any device, providing business users the ability to identify seasonal trends, behavioral patterns and cyclical issues. Business users needing historical perspectives to make critical decisions will no longer have to delay action while waiting for an analyst or spend time cross-referencing static spreadsheets.
  • Wave Actions: When insights lead to a decision, business users will now be able to act on it instantly within the app, whether it is creating a task, initiating a conversation or even changing a performance measure. And because Wave Analytics Apps are natively integrated with the Salesforce1 Platform, pre-defined data flows will not only enable changes made in the app to be reflected automatically within Salesforce, but will also update all corresponding metrics in Salesforce related to the changes.

Introducing Sales Wave Analytics — Actionable Insight For Every Sales Leader
Sales Wave Analytics will be the first Wave Analytics App in the portfolio. Now every sales leader will have the ability to boost team performance and adapt to changes in their business faster by transforming insights into action from any device. Sales Wave will deliver:

  • Sales Wave Accelerator Templates: All Salesforce sales data can be instantly explored through pre-configured sales accelerator templates — including everything from pipeline management and forecasting to quarterly business reviews, team performance and more — developed specifically for today’s sales organizations. For example, a sales operations executive will be able to instantly conduct a real-time pipeline analysis and cross reference it with product sales performance from their mobile phone to determine whether they need to reset forecasts or identify which deals need to be accelerated to hit key targets.
  • Sales Wave Historical Analysis: Sales leaders no longer have to wait for an analyst to deliver historical metrics that could impact future decisions – they can be surfaced instantly on any device on a whim. Now, every sales leader will be able to organically explore every facet of a sales team’s historical performance — such as sales revenue by quarter, year-over-year sales rep productivity, opportunity conversion rates at various funnel stages, or length of sales cycles based on deal size — to identify undiscovered trends and investment areas that will shape future growth.
  • Sales Wave Actions: Sales teams can create new tasks, change close dates and engage with the right people, directly within the app, saving time and valuable cycles. For example, coaching and team performance is an intrinsic part of a regional sales manager’s role. Now, managers will not only be able to identify high performers, but also re-deploy them to work with underperformers to share best practices and close critical large deals to exceed quotas and grow the business.

Comments on the News

  • “Until today, analytics were not built for everyone,” said Alex Dayon, president of products, Salesforce. “We are changing the game by combining intuitive analytics with business processes in Wave Analytics Apps, so every business user can not only see performance in real-time, but also take actions directly within the apps.”
  • “Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is committed to enabling lifelong learning through the education content, services and technology solutions we deliver to more than 50 million students worldwide. The Salesforce Analytics Cloud allows us to cultivate that same culture of curiosity and innovation amongst our sales organization using business data,” said Lee Ramsayer, executive vice president of sales, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “Now every sales leader can access relevant, real-time information where and when they need it most, and take actions that meet the needs of our customers and change the trajectory of our business.”

Data-Driven Companies Move Faster Than Ever with the Wave Platform
The Wave Platform brings together a dynamic user experience, indexed search and a high-speed query processing engine into a single, vertically-integrated cloud analytics platform. With its schema-free architecture, data does not have to be pre-sorted in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed. So business users can instantly query entire data sets or build customizable dashboards, lenses and charts to intuitively explore data. Optimized for both mobile phones and tablets, Wave’s responsive, free-form navigation empowers users to quickly analyze patterns, discover new trends and deliver actionable insights from anywhere to keep their business moving forward.

Pricing and Availability

  • Sales Wave Analytics is currently in pilot with select customers and is expected to be generally available in English later this year. Additional language support is forthcoming.
  • Sales Wave Analytics will be available via a per user, per month subscription model; pricing will be announced at the time of general availability.
  • Sales Wave Analytics will be also available on Apple iOS for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, with additional device support forthcoming.
  • A Wave Platform license is not required for Sales Wave Analytics.