Data Mining and ‘What If’ Analysis Tools

Without powerful data mining tools, the ability to obtain valuable insight into the datasets contained within Salesforce.com is limited. Yes, there are list views and reports that can be built, but these are not dynamic enough to support what I would refer to as “What-If” analysis. For those who are handy with Excel, you may be aware of the concept as defined below:

What-If Analysis is the process of changing the values in cells to see how those changes will affect the outcome of formulas on the worksheet.

“What if” you had the ability to enter values into various search fields within Salesforce to see how that affects the result sets of data contained within the database?

Apply that same type of “what-if analysis” to your Salesforce.com dataset and the user has a powerful data mining facility. Have you ever wanted to do some threshold analysis on your data similar to the following:

Marketing example:

How many contacts do we have with email addresses related to companies with revenues greater than $20MM? Run it again at $30MM; and again at $40MM.

Sales Research example:

I need a list of all contacts that are related to opportunities larger than $250K. Run it again but with opportunities larger than $500K; and again at $1MM.

There simply is no ability to easily perform this type of “what if” analysis in the native Salesforce.com app.

We’ve brought this type of power to the Salesforce.com platform with Ascendix Search. Take a look at the video below for a brief overview:

Ad Hoc / Snapshot Lists

There are times when I want to group records together on a purely subjective basis or in a way that could never be accommodated by a database query.

For instance,

I want to group all contacts who I have a sense are fans of baseball into a group that is quickly accessible the next time I get great seats for an upcoming game.

There are other times when I might want to take a picture in time or a “snapshot” of certain data sets to get a historical reference point.

For instance,

I run a list of all my opportunities as of a particular date, let’s say Q1 of 2017. I want to save that set of records as a snapshot to compare against future quarters in 2017 to see what differences in volume are on a quarterly basis.

With Ascendix Search, we’ve made both of these use cases possible using what we call the “Ad-Hoc List” feature.

Check out the YouTube video below to see how this is accomplished:

Get a free 30-day trial of Ascendix Search on AppExchange.