Hierarchies have gotten a bit of a bad reputation. “Hierarchical” is sometimes used to describe an organization with a rigid structure filled with bureaucracy. It sounds old and stodgy. Nowadays, we’re all about teams. However, people still report to managers and organizations need hierarchies. Everybody can’t be accountable to everybody. I think of hierarchies as accountability trees. In a good culture, hierarchies foster and protect people, not corral and pigeonhole them.

Now let’s talk about analytics. Standard business analytics sort things by location, department or general ledger. They analyze the health of a business by looking at lists of things. HR analytics are different in that they analyze people, not widgets or money. Hierarchies are critical to people analytics because they define relationships between people, their managers and their teams. It’s relatively easy to spot individual problems in an organization but it’s difficult to understand why without using a hierarchy.

To discover strengths and weaknesses on an organization’s people, we navigate the hierarchy. It’s an accountability tree and allows for impactful calculations.

Let’s take a look at a fictional company called Datamangle (a data mangling service with 20,000 employees). Turnover is high and it it’s expensive to hire and onboard a new data mangler. The CEO asked Chris in HR to find ways to increase employee retention.

The data also shows that Kelly’s people log a bit less billable time than her peers’ teams. Chris also discovered that Kelly takes significantly longer to fill open positions. At first glance, this looks bad. Kelly has probably been admonished over this.

A quick phone call to Kelly reveals that she hires very carefully and screens out candidates who aren’t a great cultural fit. Kelly also requires her managers to have 30-minute weekly one-on-ones with their people. It’s probably been difficult for Kelly, but she’s doing lots of things right.

Armed with this data, Chris recommends implementing a similar one-on-one policy for the other services teams. The loss of 30 minutes of billable time is well worth a good employee manager relationship. You’ve probably heard the adage about happy employees resulting in happy customers.

So basically this all boils down to transparency and learning from successful management. The ability to see what is going right in your organization and duplicate it across the board is a necessity in growing a successful business. Now more than ever, with the rise of technology, hierarchical analytics is becoming more important and more tangible.

That’s all this week’s sentiments on the matter, but there will be more on the topic soon. In the meantime check out some of our HR resources to learn more about hierarchy in HR analytics.

Brad Winsor, an HR guru with over 20 years of experience, is designing and developing SplashBI’s next generation of HR analytics products as Vice President of Workforce Analytics. Brad previously held the position of Vice President of Workforce Planning and Analytics at PeopleFluent for eight years. During this time, Brad developed an award-winning workforce analytics data discovery tool along with an organizational chart product that is currently a leader in the HR market.

In the previous entry we discussed missing information; how it ails Salesforce Admins and Analysts, but fortunately we found a few answers. This time we tackle data quality, a necessity for top line reports. Data quality for some admins may seems like an ambiguous term, but it’s much simpler than you’d think. Let’s break it down.

There are 2 components that make up quality data:

• Cleanliness
• Accuracy

Most of the time salesforce admins and analysts find it easy to clean data. The reason? They can do it themselves. No relying on IT to perform complicated functions or relying on Salespeople to promptly and properly enter their activities (we’ll get to that in accuracy). Clean data is like a clean house. Everything is in the right place, there is no trash lying around, and nothing is duplicated or incomplete (ok, that last one doesn’t really pertain to house cleaning).

Clean data means that the data in the database is all there (not missing), not duplicated, and up to date. When all these standards are met, your data is relevant. By removing all the broken data, you’re allowing only clean data into your reports, thus directly making them more relevant and useful.

Now when we talk about data accuracy, we’re talking about making sure the data is entered properly and that there are no mistakes. In other words, the values in the database are the correct values. In the particular case of the SFDC admin, accurate data comes from updating information This is something not entirely in control of the SFDC admin and analyst. The possible 3 hotspots where data becomes inaccurate are:

• Integrations
  When integrating a new app in Salesforce (or any CRM), admins must make sure data is coming in to the right areas. Otherwise you end up with missing or incomplete data.

• Imports
  Like integrations, you need to make sure lists are plugging in to the right system.

• Access
  The more people that have access to enter, edit, and record data in your CRM, the higher chance human error can come into play. Mis entered data, duplicate entries, and data in the wrong spot. It happens. We’re all human.

By monitoring areas where data enters the database, you can ensure that your data is accurate.

When your data is accurate you can more effectively and efficiently connect your departments to each other and improve the communication between them. Accurate data eliminates any questions or ambiguity and puts puzzle pieces together that tell the real story of what’s happening across the departments of your organization.

With good data quality Salesforce admins can get data to show the clear, linear, and chronological steps of a deal and truly make effective reports. Effectively cleaning data enables admins, analysts, and management to investigate their organization and gauge which areas are doing well, and which areas could use some refinement.

To learn more about SplashBI and its amazing ability to improve organizations reporting processes, check out our reporting page. Need Salesforce® specific answers? Visit our Salesforce® connector page to answer all your Salesforce admin related questions.

There are a few problems that you will undoubtedly run into as a Salesforce admin, analyst, or someone who finds themselves building a report from CRM data. Frustrating as it can be, these issues have no definite solution… but we are here to help you understand why these problems exist and provide the tools to pinpoint a unique solution that suits your reporting needs.

Out of the problems likely to present themselves, the most commonly encountered obstacle is missing information. Often the cause of missing information can be narrowed down to three reasons:

1) Salespeople not entering in information
2) Your marketing team is not providing a field for that information to be collected
3) Your team is not gathering that information at trade shows

To discern the origin of these missing information, we will take a heuristic approach. The first step is the easiest and most accessible method of finding out why your information is missing; just ask your salesmen. It may sound accusatory, but it’s not. Sometimes information is missing sheerly because someone did not enter the data.

The quick solution to this problem is to talk with a salesman or sales manager and ensure that standard operating procedure is being followed and enforced. This guarantees that everyone is getting the information they need to help run a successful organization.

Incomplete data entry is not always the answer to why your information is missing. The problem may lie in how your organization is gathering data. In today’s digital world, many companies acquire leads through online platforms. Typically, the process of digital lead acquisition conforms to:
1) Have interesting content available for download on your website
2) Put a form fill in front of downloadable content
3) Someone visiting your website sees the content and becomes interested
4) The visitor submits their personal information in the form fill
5) Visitor is now able to and does download the content
6) Visitor becomes lead

The important aspect of this process for Salesforce admins, analysts, and report builders to pay attention to is the form fill. This is the key to gathering the information you need. The information this form fill collects is what goes into your CRM. So, if there is a field (first name, last name, company, etc.) missing on the form fill that new leads fill out, you can be sure that is the reason for your missing information.

The final reason for missing information is very similar to the previous reason, it just takes place in a different setting. At tradeshows, sales representatives and booth operators alike are focused on one thing: booking demos. So much so that collecting CRM information pertinent to your report building can be forgotten from their list of to dos. Again, speaking with the trade show team is the way to remedy
this issue. Prior to the show, ensure that everyone understands what information must be collected from leads and how everyone eventually benefits from this collection of information.

Solving the issue of missing information boils down to two things: the salesforce admin’s ability to understand how the information collecting process takes place in your organization, and how they communicate with the people who facilitate that process. This post is the first of many relating to issues encountered by Salesforce admins, analysts, and report builders, so stay tuned for more!

To learn more about SplashBI and its amazing ability to improve organizations reporting processes, check out our reporting page. Need Salesforce® specific answers? Visit our Salesforce® connector page to answer all your Salesforce admin related questions.

So far in our Salesforce Admin Blog series, we’ve covered everything from how to deal with missing data, to tips and tricks for keeping data clean and accurate, to ways that you can efficiently build the best reports for management. In Part 4, we’ll cover what month-end closing time means for SFDC Admins, how to keep up with your data during the chaos and offer tips on how to make your month-end close a little less chaotic.

You are the steward of data quality and business processes, so you have to be consistent and somewhat of an “enforcer.” During month-end, organizations find it hard to predict how much revenue is truly being generated due to lack of information in their CRM. Data is an extremely valuable asset⸺proper decision making relies on accurate, timely data. If you don’t have the correct data, how will your sales teams know what to improve on next month? What did they do well this time? And most importantly, how can they close more deals?

As an admin, you are responsible for a multitude of ongoing tasks. Your duties range from guiding users through developing their first report, maintaining data quality, adding fields, creating reports, running backups… the list goes on. The best way to ensure that you are ready for end-of-the-month crunch time? Budget your time!

• Write a to-do list by hand, keep constant reminders of upcoming due dates in your phone, use the calendar feature on your machine⸺Users depend on the Salesforce infrastructure and quality of data, which means they depend on you to deliver that data.
• You can separate your to-do lists into four categories: real-time, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Once you have a feel for the way things work around your organization, you’ll know what’s expected of you during that specific time.

When it comes to your responsibilities, staying organized is the best way to ease month-end pain for everyone.

With all your data in order, and all your sales reps making an effort to keep things updated, management can learn from the data and plan for upcoming months. Ultimately it leads to a better-managed sales team, a better-managed company, and higher revenues. Not only this, but it leads to less time reconciling data, which -let’s be honest- as an SFDC admin the less data reconciliation you have to do the happier everyone will be!

To learn more about SplashBI and its amazing ability to improve organizations reporting processes, check out our reporting page. Need Salesforce® specific answers? Visit our Salesforce® connector page to answer all your Salesforce admin related questions.

In the previous entry, we discussed what data quality means and how you, as an SFDC admin, can achieve it. In Part 3 of our Salesforce Admin series, we discuss the role of a Salesforce admin on a team and how it affects admin reporting tasks. Executives and sales teams often turn to Salesforce admins when they have questions about the pipeline that only an admin would know the answer to. Often times, this results in a new report being generated.

It may seem like a daunting task to come up with a solution, but we have found the following method to be a solid starting point. It can help you outline the necessary steps you must take to accomplish your goal.

To begin, SFDC admins must ask themselves some basic questions:

• How do I connect the right systems, processes, and users to the right data?
• How can I generate an answer from the data that I already have?
• What is missing, what are the limitations, and how can I overcome them?

Management is looking for answers here. How can you give them the information they need?  You need to figure out what data to connect them to. Management needs to see the right data if they are going to get utility out of the reports you provide. Ask yourself: which systems can provide this data? You must connect to the right systems, use the most effective processes, and grant the right permissions to view this sensitive data.

Admins need to understand what those systems are, which processes are relevant to management’s business problem, and what needs to be done from a backend point to give leaders the information they need.

After determining which data to connect your users to and how to format it, there are only a few things left to consider. Is anything missing? Am I facing any limitations in providing management with this data?

You may find that the data you need is missing, or the way you are collecting data is not providing clear and actionable answers to management’s questions. The two previous blogs on “Missing Information” and “Data Quality” take a deep dive into these possible issues and provide insight into why you may be facing these limitations in your reporting endeavors.

Identifying your limitations is an important step. Think of this step as you going the extra mile to ensure there are no communication issues in the future. Management will appreciate you taking initiative— and you’ll save yourself a lot of work down the road!

To learn more about SplashBI and its amazing ability to improve organizations reporting processes, check out our reporting page. Need Salesforce® specific answers? Visit our Salesforce® connector page to answer all your Salesforce admin related questions.