KEEP IT SIMPLE
The Truthiness of Number Spinning
Last week I was chatting with a LucidEra customer who told me that her hunch that the top sales reps were closing the biggest deals turned out to be completely false once she dug into the data. As much as she tried to prove her hypothesis by “slicing and dicing” the data in different ways, the numbers just wouldn’t lie for her. This important discovery ended up having a huge impact on the business…once she was able to prove that the data was accurate (and she wasn’t crazy!) to other people in the sales and finance organizations.
I was thinking about this story as I watch the pundits and democratic campaigns spin the numbers after Tuesday’s late-night results in Indiana. There seems to be a lot of truthiness in how people are spinning the numbers to match their world view. Personally, I look to the Numbers Guy for the hard facts. Check out this post on The Primary Math After Indiana and North Carolina. It contains a great summary of the results and some things to think about as you analyze the health of your sales pipeline and performance of your sales team:
- “Numerical narratives…have limitations.”
- “A trend depends entirely on the endpoints you choose.”
- “Spinning the numbers is an exercise to influence…”
So don’t be mesmerized by ”magic maps“, pundit opinion, and number spinning truthiness. Just keep these famous quotes in mind:
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
—Mark Twain/Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910) quoted by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
“It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.”
—Charles Frederick Mosteller (1916–present)
“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
—Roger Brinner (dates unknown)
“There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”
—Rex Stout (1886–1975)
posted by Darren Cunningham at 11:21 am
Ashe on SaaS
While SAP has been busy publishing integration roadmaps (and occasional apologies) for the company formerly known as Business Objects, the good folks at IBM have been fairly quiet about their plans for my Canadian friends at Cognos. It seems to be a foregone conclusion that Cognos will become just another piece of IBM’s Information On Demand infrastructure (as outlined in this slide).
Well today ZDNet published an in-depth interview with Rob Ashe, who is now the GM of IBM’s business intelligence and performance management business unit. In the interview, Ashe highlights IBM’s independence from transactional systems (such as SAP’s BusinessByDesign, er I mean BusinessByTwoTen). When asked about the intersection of SaaS and business intelligence, he has this to say:
“BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS. Every company is different because even if transaction systems are the same the decision making process is different. Unlike Netsuite or a CRM application where everyone does the same basic things, BI uses a different model every company. The one to many model doesn’t work. That being said there are other aspects of SaaS that make sense for BI. These SaaS vendors accumulate data. We have 30 OEMs that use SaaS offerings to share to reflect data back to customer.”
This is not a surprising viewpoint, given that IBM is primarily focused on managing data, but he completely misses the opportunity for BI to evolve from being tools and plumbing for IT to manage and maintain, to become simple to set-up and simple to use business analytic applications that deliver built-in domain expertise and best practices. With its focus configuration, not customization, the SaaS model is uniquely suited to deliver on the promise of analytic applications. Yes, there will certainly will be challenges along the way, but it sounds to me like the Cognos crew, despite having acquired Celequest and made a few announcements about their Salesforce integration, is now content to simply tip-toe around SaaS as they are slowly consumed by IBM’s information management framework over time.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 1:34 pm
Great Reviews for LucidEra on the AppExchange
LucidEra for Salesforce.com received a couple of great reviews on the AppExchange this week:
As always, we’d like to thank our customers for taking the time to share their feedback on the AppExchange. We’re extremely proud of these reviews and will continue to focus and deliver on on our company values of simplicity, adoption, analytic innovation, and success (SAAS).
posted by Darren Cunningham at 7:02 am
SaaS and Business Intelligence are CIO Priorities
As the role of the Chief Information Officer evolves to become the Chief Intelligence Officer (or as the IT Exec track is called at Dreamforce Europe this week, Chief Innovation Officer), InformationWeek has published 8 Trends in IT that CIOs Can’t Ignore.
According to Accenture’s Kishore Swaminathan, the consulting firm’s chief scientist,they are:
- Cloud Computing
- Light Systems (another name for mashups I believe)
- Business Intelligence (due to “an increasing demand for actionable corporate data”)
- The Always-Connected User (which can be very dangerous while driving on the 101 and not exactly family friendly)
- Social Networking
- Dramatic Growth in User Generated Content
- The Forever Beta Approach to Software (there goes the saying, “ship happens!”)
- Sustainability (aka Green Computing (if it can avoid the backlash that Seth Godin predicts for Green Marketing I guess)
Sounds like there’s a need for easy to learn and use SaaS business intelligence solutions that can easily mash-up with other applications, allow you to easily collaborate and share information with your colleagues, and consume very little energy from IT.
Here’s a Podcast from the Boulder BI Brain Trust that talks about just such an idea…
posted by Darren Cunningham at 12:52 pm
5 Signs You Need Better Sales Analytics
I few weeks ago I wrote an article for Salesforce Times called Signs Your Sales Pipeline Might be Based on Fiction or Fantasy. Here are 5 Signs You Need a Better Approach to Sales Analytics:
posted by Darren Cunningham at 3:25 pm
Can You Answer These Questions About Your Sales Pipeline?
“Don’t expect what you can’t inspect.”
If you’re managing a highly transactional sales organization, it’s critical that you have visibility into what’s coming into your pipeline, what’s going out, and what’s changed. And you need to be able to see the trend over time. Here are some of the questions you must be able to answer to ensure your sales pipeline is not based on fiction or fantasy:
New Pipeline Since the Beginning of the Month, Quarter or Year
- What’s new in the pipeline since the beginning of the selected time period?
- What % of the pipeline is new for this period?
- What % of the new pipeline has closed within the same quarter historically?
Pipeline Fluctuations in the Current Period
What moved out? What’s stuck?
- What % of the current period pipeline moved out to future periods?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Where has the pipeline shrunk?
- What % of the current period pipeline shrunk?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Where has the pipeline grown?
- What % of the current period pipeline grew?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, products, industry verticals, etc.)
Pipeline Velocity
- What % of the current period pipeline is stuck in its current stage?
- What % of the current period pipeline has progressed to subsequent stages?
Pipeline Size and Shape
What are your conversion rates and sales cycle times?
- Lead to opportunity
- Opportunity to demo
- Demo to quote
- Quote to close
What % of your current period pipeline is above and below the thresholds of average days to close for deals that end up being won?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What % of your current period pipeline is nearing the threshold of average days to close for deals that end up being lost?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What is the pipeline for the remaining month, quarter or year?
- Next 30, 60, 90 days, etc.?
What is the % distribution for early stage versus late stage opportunities?
- By region
- By sales rep
Are there some possible quick wins?
- What are the dynamics of new versus repeat business?
- How many days to close for new versus repeat business?
- What is the current period pipeline for new versus repeat business?
If you’re a Salesforce.com customer, be sure to check out the LucidEra Analytics Gallery on the AppExchange for examples of these and other best-practice sales analytics. Also register for next week’s webcast with the Milestone Group on The Science of Selling - How to Maximize Sales Success with On-Demand Analytics.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 6:55 am
Coffee with Ken and the Weekly Review
No, he wasn’t Keith Olbermann’s Worse Person in the World on Tuesday - that was NPR’s Ken Rudin. Actually, our Ken was this week’s featured guest on Selling Power’s coffee break online videos. The 5 minute videos are:
- How Analytics Accelerate the Sales Cycle
- CRM Analytics and Sales Productivity (Part 1)
- CRM Analytics and Sales Productivity (Part 2)
Here’s a quick summary of this week’s action on the Keep it Simple blog:
- A summary of what it takes to deliver Successful SaaS Business Intelligence: Simplicity, Focus, Platform Power, Customer Success
- Are you simply automating a broken process? - the first video in the series appears on Selling Power
- CRMBuyer and McKinsey highlight SaaS innovation
It’s a big game for the Sharks at home tonight in San Jose. Keep your fingers crossed…
Have a fantastic weekend!
posted by Darren Cunningham at 8:08 am
New Twists Causing a Business Intelligence Boom
Part Two of the CRMBuyer BI Boom Series was published on Monday. The article begins with this strong introduction:
“The new, agile players in the business intelligence market are breaking out the bag of tricks to challenge the dominance of established firms. Among the advances they are pushing are on-demand software, visual reporting and ease of use that cuts business users’ reliance on IT assistance.”
The innovation that SaaS is delivering within the IT industry was also highlighted this week by the good folks at McKinsey & Co. As Abhijit Dubey, associate principal for McKinsey, told attendees at the Interop conference in Las Vegas: “The stakes are very high!”
Some of the key points from the McKinsey survey:
- Companies deploying traditional software spend 60 to 70 cents of every dollar invested on software over a five-year period on the underlying platform driving the applications. For users of SaaS, that amount drops to 20 to 30 cents on the dollar.
- A SaaS deployment holds the potential of significantly higher platform productivity and faster time from creation of a service to actual consumption by the end user.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 9:36 am
Are You Automating a Broken CRM Process?
Check out this 5 minute video Q&A with Gerhard Gschwandtner at Selling Power. It provides an overview of how the right approach to sales analytics can help you you optimize the sales process and maximize sales performance. This is part 1 of a 2 part interview with Ken Rudin.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 11:11 am
Successful SaaS Business Intelligence
I wrote an article last week for Salesforce Times called, The Keys to SaaS Business Intelligence Success. As Ken Rudin stated in last week’s InsideCRM interview:
“Much of the reason that many customers historically haven’t been able to fully harness the capabilities of their BI solution is because traditional BI solutions have been very complicated to deploy and maintain, and very difficult to use.”
The four keys to SaaS BI success are:
- Simplicity
- Analytic Applications Focus
- On-Demand Platform Power
- Customer Success
You can also check out the PowerPoint summary on Slideshare.
I’m interested in your feedback on this topic.
posted by Darren Cunningham at 12:33 pm
Ken Rudin is the CEO of LucidEra. He co-founded the on-demand business intelligence company in 2005. Ken is a veteran of the rapidly growing software as a service industry with over 7 years of experience as an executive with leading on-demand software vendors. These include roles at Salesforce.com, at Netsuite (as an advisor), and at Siebel's on-demand division.
Darren Cunningham is the Director of Product Marketing at LucidEra. Prior to joining LucidEra he was the Category Director for salesforce.com AppExchange Analytics and Data Management. Before joining the on-demand world, he spent over 7 years at Business Objects.
Nate Bride is a Senior Account Executive at LucidEra. Nate has over 14 years experience in building, training, and running sales teams. Most recently, Nate was the VP of Sales at Abso, a leading provider of talent management solutions. Prior to Abso, Nate ran Sales Effectiveness at Salesforce.com. Nate is married with two young daughters and lives one hour from Lake Tahoe.