• Ken Rudin kicked things off on a quiet Friday afternoon with a Cognos SaaS Smackdown
• Milestone-Group outlined how sales is becoming more science than art in the Science of Selling webinar with DestinationCRM
• James Taylor (not that James Taylor) got the “analytics semantics” conversation started
• Richard Hackathorn got some SaaS BI religion (just don’t call it that!)
• The Telebusiness Alliance heard about The W5 of Sales Analytics

As they say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the data center!”

Bon weekend.

Here’s what we call the W5 of Sales Analytics:

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“The best information only has value if it is utilized in a critical business process. That utilization is dependent on individuals who must understand the information, connect its significance to the business, and execute the necessary changes to the business.”

Clearly the BBBT meeting and the business intelligence market shift to SaaS in generally got the juices flowing, as Richard also wrote a post over at the B-Eye Network called, “Software-as-a-Service and Enterprise IT: Friend or Foe?” In this post he asks some tough questions about SaaS, IT, and traditional approaches to business intelligence. He concludes that “BI as a Service” as a market category has been mislabeled. In his words:

“SaaS in general and BI-as-a-Service in particular must be transformed into ‘performance-focused analytics’ which is part of Business Performance Management. The objective should be to continuously innovate on best business practices for specific business processes. That is not competitive or disruptive to corporate IT. In fact, it can be an essential value proposition for corporate IT.”

I don’t we’ve heard the last from Mr. Hackathorn on this topic…

“An analytic application must meet each of the following three conditions:

• Process support. Packaged application software that structures and automates a group of tasks pertaining to the review and optimization of business operations (i.e., control) or the discovery and development of new business (i.e., opportunity)
• Separation of function. Can function independently of an organization’s core transactional applications, yet can be dependent on such applications for data and may send results back to these applications
• Time-oriented, integrated data from multiple sources. Extracts, transforms, and integrates data from multiple sources (internal or external to the business), supporting a time-based dimension for analysis of past and future trends, or accesses such a database.”

We’re often asked by Salesforce.com customers about the differences between a transactional CRM application and an analytic application. This whitepaper and chart provide a high-level summary:

This week the conversation shifted from what is an analytic application to what is this thing called an analytic in the first place. James Taylor at Smart (Enough) Systems wrote a post called, “The Most Important Thing I know About Analytics is that No-one Agrees What it Means.” James walks through some of the different terms he’s heard the for ”analytics” and concludes that it’s “too broad a term to use lightly.” His post is already generating some interesting discussion.

Join us tomorrow for an interactive webinar with our partner Milestone Group. The topic of the discussion is: The Science of Selling: Maximizing Sales Success with On-Demand Analytics.

Featured presenters will be Mark Zawacki, Managing Partner & Founder, Milestone Group and Ken Rudin, CEO and Co-Founder, LucidEra. Register to learn and discuss:

• How to accelerate top line growth with the right approach to business analytics
• How to compete more effectively with on-demand sales analytics
• How to turn your sales pipeline into a “sales supply chain”
• How SaaS is lowering the barriers to business intelligence adoption for companies of all sizes

“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 at every company.”

For the past decade, the notion that ‘every company is different’ has been the rallying cry of any traditional software vendor trying to brush aside the SaaS trend. When I was at salesforce.com in 1999, the traditional CRM vendors were claiming that CRM doesn’t lend itself to SaaS, because every company has a unique sales process, everyone has a different sales organization structure, and everyone manages their pipeline differently. To some extent, that’s true. But, there is enough similarity between enough companies that SaaS CRM works as long as the SaaS vendor provides the ability to configure the solution to account for the differences. So, every SaaS CRM solution lets you configure the sales stages to match those of your company, and define the reporting structure that your sales organization uses.

The exact same argument holds true for BI. I ran a BI consulting company for many years, and we built lots of typical analytic solutions such as sales and pipeline analysis, marketing analysis, and financial analysis. We learned that though the specific way companies would word their questions about a specific business area were often different, the types of questions they asked about that business area were very similar. For example, let’s looks at sales analytics. There are typical questions that people want to ask no matter what company they’re in, such as which deals are moving through their pipeline and which ones are stuck, how has their pipeline has changed over time, how are their sales reps performing across a range of common metrics, what are the trends in new versus repeat business, etc.

That is, there is enough similarity between the types of questions people ask about their business to make SaaS BI work very well, as long as the vendor gives you the ability to configure the solution to account for the specifics of how your company works (such as being able to include in the analysis custom fields that exist in a transactional system).

Need proof that it works? Check out salesforce.com’s AppExchange to see the customer success that LucidEra’s customers are having with on-demand analytics. How does Rob Ashe explain that?

Here are the Keep it Simple highlights of the week:

• 5 Signs You Need a Better Approach to Sales Analytics (sorry about the snake swallowing the egg picture!)
•  SaaS and Business Intelligence are CIO Priorities (surprise, surprise…)
• Great Reviews for LucidEra on the AppExchange (yes, we’re a little proud of this)
• Ashe on SaaS (no comments yet for this post or the ZDNet interview with Rob Ashe)
• The Truthiness of Number Spinning (with apologies to Stephen Colbert)

I also did a quick post on the Salesforce Times site about a new mid-market business intelligence survey and we received some great feedback from Claudia Imhoff following Ken Rudin’s presentation to the Boulder BI Brain Trust. You can check out her post and the podcast here.

Have a great weekend!

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)

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 on 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.

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).