Automating Sales Ops Reporting with DataBlade
In sales ops, you are constantly juggling territories, pipelines, contracts, leads, projects, KPIs, and revenue reporting for your sales teams. That’s a lot on your plate!
With DataBlade, you can connect your Salesforce data, other external data sources, and set-up a template for your weekly reporting. Then, schedule your reports and you are done. No more manually pulling, merging and distributing reports each week.
This tutorial will walk you through how to get started doing sales ops, the DataBlade way.
1. Connect to Salesforce
Once logged in, click the Data Integrations and Files icon in the left navigation. Then, select Salesforce from the Add Integration dropdown.
You will then get a chance to give this integration a name and select whether your are connecting to your production or sandbox environment. Once you click Authenticate with Salesforce, you will be taken through a login flow. During this flow, you will be asked to provide permissions to allow DataBlade to access Salesforce. Once you agree, you should see a message saying that your integration was successfully created!
2. Upload any outside data
If you need to augment your CRM data with external data for your reporting purposes, you can easily upload CSVs or Excel files. For example, if you wanted to upload sales goals, click the Data Integrations and Files icon in the left navigation and scroll down to the Data Files header. Click the Upload CSV or Excel button and select the file containing the data you want to upload.
3. Pull your data for reporting
When you are ready to pull together data for reporting, click the Projects icon in the left nav. In the text box, give your project a name and click Create Project.
Once you are in the project page, the first thing we will want to do is start to pull Salesforce data. In the Add Data Source dropdown, select Salesforce Query.
You’ll now see an interface that will guide you through the process of pulling data from your CRM. In the Integration field, make sure the integration we created in step #1 is selected. Then, choose the object and fields you would like pull. You can repeat this process for as many object types you need to pull for reporting.
Remember the data that we manually uploaded? We’ll want to pull that data too. To do that, select File Upload from the Add Data Source dropdown and select the name of the file you uploaded.
Now, click the Run Query button near the top of the page and you should see all your data coming through!
4. Apply formulas and analysis
Every sales team will have a different way to analyzing and summarizing their CRM data for reporting. Luckily, DataBlade has an incredibly Excel integration so you can continue to use the tools you are already familiar with. After you successfully run your query, click the Download Report to Excel button.
Once you open the file in Excel, you’ll see that all your data is represented in different sheets. To build your custom analysis and summary, you are now free to add any additional sheets that contain summaries, pivot tables, graphs, all linking off the data generated by DataBlade.
5. Schedule and Automate
Once you are happy with your Excel workbook, save your file and go back to DataBlade. You can now upload the workbook that contains all your custom analysis back to DataBlade. Click the down arrow next to the Download Report to Excel button and click Configure Excel Template. Upload your modified workbook, and incredibly, DataBlade can now automatically pull your data, populate your workbook, and refresh all your custom analysis!
At this point, we’ve already gone through all the steps to create a workflow that will automatically pull your data, bring it into Excel, apply your custom analysis, and generate a result, all in a single click. Wouldn’t it be better if you didn’t even need to do that single click?
In the drop right corner of your project page, click the Schedule button. In the window that pops up, choose the schedule you want, then choose Email with Excel report from the dropdown. Enter the emails of the people who should receive the report, add a quick description, and you are done!
Now, every week, DataBlade will automatically pull your data, construct your Excel report, and distribute it to all the relevant people on your team.
Have questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out! Interested in doing sales op the DataBlade way? Start your free trial today!
