Many enterprises leverage Salesforce for its native reports and dashboards to understand their data and performance. However, over the last few years, with “the volume of customer data has been growing exponentially every day, exploring data manually has become a bigger challenge” (click here to read more).
CRM Analytics (formerly Tableau CRM, formerly Einstein Analytics) was created to solve this challenge.
CRM Analytics is a powerful business intelligence platform that allows users to analyze, aggregate, and visualize both Salesforce and non-Salesforce data effectively. In this blog post, we tackle what your team needs to know to get started with Salesforce CRM Analytics. If you are still in the decision making process, check out this post to understand how CRM Analytics can benefit the C-Suite.
In this post, we cover how to set up your CRM Analytics instance and other configuration basics, including:
How to assign CRM Analytics licenses and permission sets in Salesforce
How to enable CRM Analytics in Salesforce
Five features to consider enabling when setting up an CRM Analytics instance
Key Concepts of CRM Analytics
Before we dive in, let’s look at the necessary planning your team should complete before enabling CRM Analytics.
Planning for a Successful CRM Analytics Implementation
Before your organization even enables Salesforce CRM Analytics, first consider:
- Who internally will own CRM Analytics? (CRM Analytics Admins)
- Who will use the Dashboards/insights? (CRM Analytics Users)
- Where will development take place? (Sandbox vs. Production)
Should a Salesforce Admin Own CRM Analytics?
Determining who will own CRM Analytics as a platform is crucial. Often organizations will assign this responsibility to one of their Salesforce Admins. However, an Analyst team member(s) who has experience turning stakeholders reporting needs into technical requirements is often better suited for this task.
In an ideal state (and with proper design), CRM Analytics is a self serve analytics tool that empowers end-users to answer their questions. Selecting a team member who has the correct experience is key to building a roadmap to achieve this goal.
Understanding Your Audience
CRM Analytics facilitates enterprise-wide visibility into Salesforce data as well as other data sources, like ERPs or Date Warehouses. The app-based design of CRM Analytics makes it easy to ensure users get access to what they need for their specific role.
Before enabling CRM Analytics , understand which departments or teams will be leveraging CRM Analytics and what insights they’re looking for.
Development Location
While CloudKettle always recommends production when possible, we know that due to the development lifecycle of many organizations, sandbox development will be a requirement. With this in mind CloudKettle recommends a recently-refreshed, full copy sandbox. To learn more about development lifecycles and best practices for migration CRM Analytics to production check out this post on our CRM Analytics development lifecycle.
How to Assign CRM Analytics Licenses and Permission Sets
The first step in setting up a CRM Analytics instance is to assign permission set licenses and permission sets to users in Salesforce. CRM Analytics comes with two pre-made permission sets: CRM Analytics Admin and CRM Analytics User. Your team can also create custom permission sets based on these to suit your organization’s needs.
A permission set license gives a Salesforce user the ability to access features related to CRM Analytics. The CRM Analytics Permission Set defines which features in CRM Analytics that user can then access.
How to Enable CRM Analytics in Salesforce
In Salesforce, go to Setup and search for Analytics and click Getting started. From here, enable CRM Analytics for your Org.
Next, click on Settings in the search pane. If you enabled CRM Analytics prior to the Winter ’20 release, a very useful feature to turn on is Data Sync (the first checkbox). If your organization enabled CRM Analytics (previously Tableau CRM) after the Winter ’20 Salesforce release, then Data Sync will be automatically turned on.
Five Features to Consider Enabling in CRM Analytics
When Data Sync is enabled, it automatically syncs Salesforce data from connected objects on a separate schedule. This helps speed up many features in CRM Analytics. Under the Settings section of Setup, there are five useful features that we recommend your team considers enabling. Here is a breakdown of these five features (to do this, check the box beside the feature as seen in the image above):
- Analytics Templates: This allows other users to build apps based on a templated version of existing apps. This provides massive time-savings when a new app needs to be created but also maintains design consistency or certain data points.
- Email Subscriptions to CRM Analytics Dashboard Widgets: This feature allows users to subscribe to dashboard widgets and for changes in metrics to trigger an email notification.
- Data Blending In CRM Analytics Explorer: This feature allows users to access the Data Blending feature in any Lens. This is important because it lets users combine data from multiple related datasets at time of analysis, without having to use a Recipe or Dataflow (we talk about Recipes and Dataflows in our post here).
- CRM Analytics Direct Data for External Data Sources: This allows users to query external connected data sources directly from the source. This eliminates having to create a Recipe or Dataflow that pulls data from the source into a new Dataset.
- Inherit Sharing from Salesforce: This enables the option for created datasets to inherit sharing and security settings from the base Salesforce object. This feature is useful if you want to maintain the same data visibility for CRM Analytics users as in Salesforce.
How to Launch Analytics Studio
Now that CRM Analytics has been enabled, to launch Analytics Studio type “Analytics Studio” into the search bar in the App Launcher and it will launch in a new window. Down the line, your organization can also embed CRM Analytics dashboards directly in a Salesforce page so that users can view their insights without having to leave the Salesforce environment they’re used to.
Key Concepts of CRM Analytics
Now, let’s review some of CRM Analytics’s key concepts to help your team get started with CRM Analytics.
Analytics Apps
An app is a container that holds all assets related to a certain project, department, or team. Each app can contain Dashboards, Lenses, Datasets and Stories.
Datasets
A dataset is a CRM Analytics version of a data table. It is denormalized, which helps with query speeds.
Lenses
A lens is a tool that users can use to explore datasets to answer single business questions or better understand what the data looks like within. Explorations that are done in lenses can be saved and even added to a Dashboard.
Dashboards
A Dashboard is a collection of dashboard widgets (aka lenses) that, when combined, tell a story that is relevant to the end user. Dashboards have many advanced features like Interactions, Faceting, Filtering, etc. that allow end users to harvest insights by drilling down, grouping, and pivoting data to their needs.
Trailhead: Getting Started with CRM Analytics
Now that you have a general understanding of apps, datasets, lenses, and dashboards, Trailhead is a great way to level up your understanding and skills. Check out the Salesforce Einstein Basics and CRM Analytics Basics modules for a free way to learn more about getting started with CRM Analytics.
Wrap Up
We hope this post gave you actionable insights on how to set up and configure CRM Analytics as well as an overview of some of the platform’s fundamental features.
If you have any questions about this blog or how to leverage CRM Analytics to solve enterprise business challenges, reach out today!
