Building reports and dashboards in
Salesforce can often prove to be difficult due to the limitations imposed
through the out-of-the-box functionality in Salesforce reporting. I have listed
five existing limitations in Salesforce reporting as well how pulling your
Salesforce data into Tableau to build reports and dashboards can address these
limitations.
1. Calculated Fields
Oftentimes, users will see a report and
will want to create a new metric for it. For example, you could be looking at a
report of your revenues by account and wonder what the percentage breakdown of
total revenue is for each account. Getting this information in Salesforce would
require creating a new Formula Field. In Tableau however, in addition to the
calculated field option, you could simply right-click the existing revenue
field, and change it to be a percentage of the total in just a few seconds.
This is referred to in Tableau as a Quick Table Calculation. Tableau offers
maximum flexibility with these calculations in terms of the desired level of
aggregation. E.g. you can choose to get the percentage breakdown by row,
column, or both. The quick table calculations are not limited to percentages
either, as they include creating Running Totals, Moving Averages, Percent
Differences, Ranks, and others. The available flexibility and ease of use in
creating such measures is what makes Tableau the winner when it comes to
creating calculated fields.
2. Connecting to Multiple Data Sources
A large limitation of Salesforce is that it
can only quickly report on data that exists within Salesforce. Salesforce
doesn’t have built-in connectors to point to external data sources such as an
Excel file or a SQL Server database. To integrate such data, using more complex
methods of integration such as web-service API’s must be employed. The data
must also be stored within Force.com to build the report as well. Fortunately,
the process of integrating data from multiple sources within Tableau is much
simpler. Users have several dozen built-in connectors to external data sources
in Tableau such as Amazon Redshift, Hortonworks Hadoop Hive, IBM Netezza,
Microsoft SQL Server, and even Salesforce.com. The connections to these data
sources can be live connections or extracts, allowing the user to decide
whether to pull the data into Tableau for processing or leave it pointed to the
external data source. This flexibility makes Tableau the BI tool with the most
built-in external data source connectors.
3. Default Chart Types
Visualizing data with charts and other
graphics can be essential to understanding it. Salesforce’s built-in
capabilities provide a very limited number of chart types to visualize data.
The charts available in Salesforce are limited to the following types: bar
charts, column charts, line charts, pie charts, donut charts, funnel charts,
and scatter charts. This means the standard user is not able to create a map to
see how their sales are distributed across different geographies, or a simple
box plot to see what the distribution of opportunity amounts are across
different accounts. The out-of-the-box functionality to create bullet graphs,
histograms, or bubble charts is simply not available with Salesforce reports.
These limitations ultimately hinder the ability of decision makers to gain
insight from the reports.
4. Interacting With Data
One of the most useful features a report
can have is allowing users to interact with the data they see. This is
something Tableau delivers on very well, and something that Salesforce requires
a lot of customization for in order to implement. When looking at a bar chart
of sales by region for example, a user may want to click into a specific region
and see a new bar chart that shows the sales of the various accounts composing
that region. This drill-down and filtering capabilities don’t come standard in
Salesforce reports and dashboards, but are very easy to implement in Tableau.
To implement something like this in Salesforce, Force.com APIs would need to be
employed, preventing the average administrator from building interactive charts
for users.
5. Cross-Object Reporting
This is a big one. Salesforce has
difficulty reporting across multiple objects that are not parent/child objects
but still have common data, making them worth combining into a single report.
For example, to get insight into which lead sources are converting to
opportunities and revenue, two different reports would need to be created and
then merged in an external reporting system to gain insightful information from
the data. Tableau is able to combine data from multiple sources onto a single
report simply by recognizing common field names and data values. This feature
in Tableau makes it possible to not only quickly create a report like the one
just mentioned, but also to create reports with data outside of Salesforce. For
example, if you had a monthly sales quota spreadsheet in Excel broken out by
salesperson, you could easily overlay this data in Tableau with existing
opportunity data pulled in from Salesforce to get quick insights into which of
your salespeople are meeting their quota for this month, year, etc.
This article is not intended to bash
Salesforce as a CRM tool, for which it is best in class. It is simply to state
the reporting limitations of Salesforce and point out reporting-specific tools
like Tableau which can address these limitations. Please share your thoughts on
these points as well as any other limitations you have come across.
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