Empower your sales team with Historical Data!
Get access to historical data right where you need it.
With the Spring’14 release the Salesforce Analytics API allows users to dynamically choose date and get historical data. To understand how we can take advantage of this enhancement, lets take a look at the following screenshot.
Problem
The sales manager monitoring the Acme account wants to looks at the open pipeline and compare it to what it was at the beginning of the week or even beginning of the month. Achieving this in any traditional business system would require access to the data-warehousing system — a time-consuming and expensive process and most business users would complain that IT isn’t helping them here. You don’t want to be the slow technology team that blocks business! With a simple custom app built on the Analytics API, you could be the super-hero who empowers the Sales team!
Technology
In Winter’14, Salesforce launched the Historical Reporting feature that provides easy real-time access to current and historical data within reports (More info: http://docs.releasenotes.salesforce.com/en-us/winter14/release-notes/rn_186_analytics_trending.htm). Starting Spring’14, these reports are not only available in the Analytics API but they can be dynamically configured to change the snapshot dates.
Solution
Combining the power of Visualforce, D3 Charts and Analytics API we can easily spin up a solution that empowers your Sales team with historical data. By embedding it on the account page with a dynamic jQuery data selector we can take a it a notch further. Now the sales team has the analytics they need in seconds and its right in context too!
