How to Effortlessly Perform Salesforce Data Analytics

Customer data can make or break your business growth!

As businesses grow, they increasingly rely on customer data to get a pulse of their audience and make strategic decisions. 

For over 150,000 companies worldwide, this data comes from Salesforce. 

But here’s the catch: Salesforce doesn’t have the nuanced data analytics capabilities you need to make informed decisions. Plus, its complicated interface and error-prone data management can also create friction.

Let’s break down your most critical challenges when performing Salesforce data analytics. And then, we’ll discuss the most effective solutions for these limitations. 

6 critical challenges in Salesforce data analytics

I spoke to several Salesforce users and read their reviews to find their six biggest concerns when analyzing data on the platform. Here’s what you might struggle with when analyzing Salesforce data.

1. Constant data duplication

One of the most common (and annoying) issues in Salesforce is duplicate records. You’ve likely struggled with duplicate data, creating confusion and misunderstanding. 

This can happen if you work with multiple stakeholders and can’t access anyone’s records. Duplication can also happen if you’re importing data from different sources. 

For example, a lead in the nurturing stage is also added in the contract stage. This duplication can cause friction within your team—especially if you’re working in a large group with multiple sales reps. Plus, it paints you in a bad light for the prospect.

Organizing scattered data points and maintaining data hygiene in Salesforce is a huge challenge.

2. Tedious data consolidation 

Another concern when analyzing Salesforce data is combining several data streams. You’ll collect data in different formats and structures. Salesforce doesn’t easily merge these varying data points in a single system. 

Teams have to rely on dev support to integrate various data sources and merge them into a single database. This creates a huge dependency and can hamper your timelines.

3. Limited customization

As you analyze Salesforce data, you’ll also realize the lack of options to customize reports, especially in the new Salesforce Lightning version. 

This is where users complain about the clunky and crowded interface. Customizing reports requires more expertise, and you get very limited functions to organize your dataset. That means, you can’t zoom in on specific data points and have to settle for limited information. 

4. Data quality and cleaning

Nobody likes updating records on Salesforce, leading to severe data quality issues. These issues can hamper your decision-making process with incomplete or inaccurate data. 

The underlying problem is difficulty following data hygiene best practices, especially in a big team. Even if you set the most comprehensive guidelines for logging data in Salesforce, it would still lead to gaps and inaccuracies. Why? Because the platform isn’t user-friendly and demands too much effort to log records.

Not just that, cleaning data in Salesforce is an equally big mountain to climb. You don’t get the tools to remove duplicate records, adjust inconsistent formatting, group/sort data, etc.

5. Complicated filtering options

Salesforce is an advanced CRM tool with dozens of options to filter your data. But that’s also a huge downside for some users. These options make the learning curve too long for users to filter data any way they want

Here’s what one Salesforce user had to say about their complicated filtering reports:

6. Complex and confusing interface

While Salesforce gives you so much in one place, it’s not the most intuitive tool to use. 

Many companies rely on third-party service providers to implement Salesforce within their org and capture data effectively. And many others struggle to make sense of the tool’s complex capabilities due to the clunky interface.

What makes the tool even more difficult to operate is its slow pace. Users often complain about Salesforce’s slow loading speed and the overall struggle of recording data in the tool. 

Use Salesforce Data Analytics Tools Without Breaking a Sweat

I get it: Salesforce is holding you back from getting the best out of your customer data. That’s why I want to introduce you to a one-stop solution for all these challenges: Gigasheet, a big data-powered spreadsheet app. 

Gigasheet gives you the ease and convenience of using spreadsheets for handling massive datasets and performing analytics. 

All you need to do to get started is integrate your Salesforce account with Gigasheet under New > Data Connections in your Library. Here you can schedule Salesforce data exports to run daily, weekly, or monthly. Optionally, leverage the Gigasheet API and with Zapier if you're looking for no-code automated workflows.

In this example I used a mock database to perform different tasks you can do with Gigasheet. Here’s how you can analyze Salesforce data using Gigasheet:

Filter data by defining specific conditions 

Group and sort data for better categorization

Clean up the database to remove redundancies 

Enrich data to add relevant information from other tools

Migrate data from multiple sources and consolidate in one sheet

You can do all of this without spending hours trying to navigate the app and understand its capabilities. It’s as simple as signing up, integrating Salesforce, and getting started!

And the icing on the cake? Gigasheet’s AI assistant makes life easier for you. You can type a prompt instructing AI to perform any action and Gigasheet will organize your data according to this prompt. 

Here’s how I experimented with Sheet Assistant. It performed the task I asked for and shared the steps to complete this task:

Say goodbye to Salesforce Data Analytics woes 👋🏻

Despite being one of the most widely used CRM tools worldwide, Salesforce has its share of weaknesses—especially when it’s about data management. 

But you shouldn’t have to compromise your business operations and decision-making because of Salesforce’s shortcomings. This is where Gigasheet can come in handy and tackle a majority of challenges impacting your data analysis on Salesforce. 

Get ahead of your customers with data-backed decision-making using Gigasheet—sign up today.

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