Tableau
“The power of the “check” lights is in their simplicity – they cut through the noise and only get your attention when there is a clear action to be taken. This is exactly what is needed in the modern enterprise.”
I love working for RelayIQ because they solve a problem I have lived with for the last 10 years, too many reports and too many dashboards without any clear link to action. So when my dad, an engineer and former business executive, called me last week and told me he researched RelayIQ but wasn’t clear on what they did, I had two thoughts. First, it is good that we just updated our website to make what we do clearer. Second, I’m pumped that I get to explain how awesome RelayIQ is to my dad using real-life examples I am passionate about.
I started by talking about how all major enterprises have invested a large percentage of their budget into analytics over the last two decades. These investments include everything from data storage to data cleaning/prep to data scientists and BI tools. I then explained that dashboards and analytic reports had become so easy to make that every executive I have worked with now has too many of them. So many, in fact, that the executive ends up ignoring them all. I compared it to getting e-mail without having a spam filter. Execs don’t know which dashboards they can trust or how to interpret the data, and they don’t have enough time to track all of these dashboards to notice when an important change occurs.
I then shared my favorite personal use case: sales and marketing pipelines. Most people I know who have worked at large companies would agree that most managers have no idea what is in their sales pipelines at any given moment. It is also common for sales managers to rarely know when an opportunity arrived and how it got there. Worse, they are often also surprised when a deal leaves the pipeline and they are unclear on why it left (if they even notice).
I’ve sat through dozens of QBRs (quarterly business reviews) where sales and marketing execs are grilled on their forecast and pipeline but have no idea what’s in there or how it got there. More than a handful of times I have seen deals that were entered into Salesforce.com as sales training exercises, or as system tests, or by employees no longer with the company that were actually left in there by accident and included in the official forecast. In some cases, these “rogue” deals skewed reporting by tens of millions of dollars.
Sounds absurd unless you have worked in a large organization with a massive Salesforce.com instance and with potentially hundreds of Tableau dashboards designed to make it “easier” to track and forecast pipeline. Does this mean these are bad tools or these sales managers are bad people? Nope. It just highlights that it has been historically impossible to keep track of every change across every dashboard, so inevitably things fall through the cracks. But few things are more important to the success of an enterprise than managing sales pipeline – so shouldn’t there be a simple system for notifying sales managers when large deals are added or removed? Forget the three dozen SFDC reports and and the 12 different dashboards – just tell me when my pipeline is out of sync with plan or has undergone dramatic changes, and what actions I should take to rectify it.
RelayIQ solves this problem literally in minutes. Simply set a threshold on your existing dashboard with an alert tied to the addition or removal of large opportunities to your pipeline. Boom. You are done. Any time a huge deal is added or removed, you get an alert. Then the salesperson who owns the deal is sent an action plan telling them to schedule a call with you to explain what happened. No more red-faced QBR meetings.
RelayiQ is a platform and this is, of course, just a single use case, but my dad got it right away. He gave me the best analogy I have heard yet for why RelayIQ is so powerful despite sounding so simple on the surface. He reminded me that when you drive your car, there are lights that turn on when you need to check your engine, when your tires need air, or when you need to replace your battery. The sensors that trigger these emergency lights continuously monitor these aspects of your car’s performance, but they only trigger when there is an important action to take. If you were forced to watch a continuous feed of data from all of those sensors, you couldn’t drive your car effectively and you would crash. Likewise, if you ignored the continuous data stream, your tires would go flat or you would destroy your engine. The power of the “check” lights is in their simplicity – they cut through the noise and only get your attention when there is a clear action to be taken. This is exactly what is needed in the modern enterprise.
Today companies are driving without a check engine light. They have more dashboards measuring more things at a higher frequency than ever before – but it has all turned into noise and a meaningless distraction that is ultimately just ignored. It has become so easy for anyone to produce an automated SFDC report or to spin up a dashboard that these communication channels cease to mean anything. Despite their analytic investments, organizations lack a tool to alert the proper people of meaningful signals in the data along with the specific actions they should take. What is needed is a simplification layer to notify people of critical changes that require action as soon as they occur.
RelayIQ is the check engine light for your enterprise. Now you can monitor all of your dashboards for the signals that require action and then automate alerts with customized action plans to the exact right people at the exact right time. Like your check engine light, RelayIQ could not be more simple or more important to the health and performance of your organization. Download a trial and get started in minutes. Never be surprised by data and analytic insights buried deep in swarms of SFDC reports and Tableau dashboards again!