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Michael Gear, GoodData's Vice President of  Sales & Field Ops, brings to you a five part blog series entitled, Kick Your Sales Into Gear: 5 Foolproof Steps.  Over the next two weeks Michael will share with his wisdom and experience for improving ... [More] both the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales organization. #1 What's Your Plan? Planning is certainly not the first love of sales managers. Besides, “The best laid plans of mice and men…...” well, you know how that goes. But, if you want to meet and even exceed your sales goals, you better have a plan. And, with business moving at breakneck speeds, real-time information must form the plan’s foundation. Because how can you plan, and know where you’re going, without a complete and detailed picture of where you are right now? With real-time data in hand, you’ll be able to minimize risks, highlight changes in opportunities and focus on high-value activities. The right (and current) data gives you great flexibility, allowing your organization to continually adapt to meet immediate needs. You want to run a successful sales organization? Then you have to use the data to plan and manage for success. No accurate data, no success. No plan based on that data, bye-bye to meeting sales goals. Avoid those no-no’s by using real-time data analysis to manage sales going forward. You’ll get a tactical view of the current sales situation, which will absolutely help ensure the success of your sales team. How much business is locked up? What progress are you making toward goals? Are you doing OK when you compare the current situation to historical estimates? Make sure you’re able to answer critical questions about the sales pipeline. Don’t slough off these queries with a “devil-may-care” attitude. Where am I now in the sales cycle? What deals are changing, and why? How can I react positively to what data is telling me? Where do I need to focus my efforts? Are there blind spots in my forecast? Drill into these questions. Unearth information that clearly shows best case/worst case scenarios. Don’t be left behind by competitors with no way to pull yourself forward. Have answers. Have a plan. Make sure you are on track to meet goals. Use the sales data at your disposal to sell. Put historical data in its place- in the past. Make your work life “data driven” to get answers to the most pressing concerns in real time. The critical data tells you if there is risk in the pipeline. If there is, and you planned ahead, you’ll have a way to alter the current path. Territory planning, coming up with quotas, managing forecasts and sales reps and reviewing everything will give you an unparalleled view into your organization. Planning effectively will eliminate end-of-quarter surprises. Get the Picture? Tell me if this aligns with your sales plan?   [Less]

All too often, at the end of the quarter, sales organizations are left confused, searching to understand what worked and what didn't. Start Selling Smarter. Read our report: Sales Analytics for Smarter Selling to see how you can take charge of your ... [More] current revenue performance management. GoodSales gives you a view into your organization that is relevant to the current point of the quarter. See what's happening now, monitor the stage velocity and manage the movement of the pipeline. Getting your hands on this data provides you the ability close more business and increase sales revenue.  If you can't answer these five critical sales questions, you are going to be left behind and you're at great risk of being left behind by competitors. Where am I now in all sales cycles? What is changing in the pipeline? How can I correctly react to what the data is telling me? Where do I need to focus my efforts? Are there any blind spots in my sales forecast? Success in meeting goals is extremely dependent on having detailed answers to your specific queries. Is you data helping you achieve your sales targets?    [Less]

Big Data. It’s a somewhat intimidating (and vague) term, but this buzzword is really quite straightforward. “Big Data” refers to the collection and storage of mass quantities of data that can then be sliced, diced and mashed up to find patterns and ... [More] trends related to everything from business to health care. The nature of the data being collected explains the recent explosion around the concept—social media “posts,” “tags,” “check-ins” and “review” are from sources that didn’t exist just 10 years ago. Most amazingly, continual analysis of this streaming data uncovers patterns as they happen. In the case of Big Data, the phrase “power in numbers” proves to be true—the more information these Big Data systems can collect, the more valuable the set of information can become. Take Siri,¹ the iPhone’s “personal assistant” application that answers questions about local restaurants, the weather forecast and current traffic conditions: Since Siri is a cloud application,² Apple engineers can continually add data that everyone benefits from instantaneously. Should you be focused on Big Data now? In short, yes. With the amount of data being created and collected doubling yearly,³ it will be more and more important to have systems that can process and extract insights of value to your business. Mike Gualtieri at Forrester wrote a great post 4 about finding “Your Big Data Score.” He postures that having an actionable definition around Big Data will enable you to determine if your company has usable Big Data. First, he asks if it can be measured by volume, velocity and variety and then applies his “Theory of Relativity” to see if the data volume, velocity and variety are relative. In other words, can you store, process and query it? From there you can calculate a score for the current state of Big Data at your company. Meglena Kuneva, European Consumer Commissioner declared (back in March 2009)5, “Personal data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world.” Has your company struck oil?  Are you able to translate volumes of data into manageable, bite-sized pieces?  If not, what data sets would you like to be using as currency that you aren’t now? [1]  http://www.wired.com/cloudline/2011/10/with-siri-apple-could-eventually-build-a-real-ai/ [2] http://www.gooddata.com/blog/bi-101-what-is-cloud-computing [3] IDC 2011 Digital Universe study, Extracting Value from Chaos [4] http://blogs.forrester.com/mike_gualtieri/12-05-17-whats_your_big_data_score  (Gartner suggests that they invented the “3 V’s” of big data in 2001, see here: http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/deja-vvvue-others-claiming-gartners-volume-velocity-variety-construct-for-big-data/) [5] World Economic Forum, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class. January 2011 [Less]

Welcome to the world of the most beautiful and most customizable dashboards out there. Period. Here at GoodData we're fanatic about user experience; we strive to provide you with the simplest and easiest way of building rich interactive dashboards ... [More] and we just added one more piece into the overall puzzle of simplicity. GoodData has allowed you to position, pixel-perfectly, any object on the dashboard including external content for quite some time and we're now making dashboards building even easier. Like in Powerpoint or Keynote, you can select multiple objects and move them around freely, copy/paste them (even among multiple tabs) or just delete them. And not just that, you can also arrange the objects in layers and move them to the front or to the back. All that via simple controls or keyboard shortcuts too. We thought this was pretty cool, but still wasn't enough. We wanted to give you even more flexibility and better tools to unleash your creativity and so from now on you can make chart background transparent which allows you to overlay the charts over each other, put graphical elements underneath or combine the charts with headline reports in a tight space (see the above graphic). Going forward we'll be allowing more customization including: Transparent background for the rich iframe web content Customized color pallet and fonts The flexibility to turn off Report Titles  Text alignment More built-in shapes We're already hearing from our passionate users who are adding background visualizations to highlight areas in charts or combining charts with micro charts and want to hear from you too.  In the comment section below, tell us what dashboards you will be able to come up with thanks to these new features. So once again welcome to the world of the most beautiful dashboards - welcome to the world of GoodData. [Less]

Product Updates You’ve Been Asking For GoodData customers receive every new feature and product when it's released—never a need to upgrade, redeploy or migrate. The focus of Release 71, was based on improving the current drill-in functionality by ... [More] bringing you an impressive new feature that provides greater flexibility when defining various drill paths. This enhancement enables you to break a metric or attribute value down by a different attribute or you can even drill across from your original report into another report. Also in Release 71, GoodData made significant report computation and data loading performance improvements. > Data Warehousing: Have You Taken Stock of Your Warehouse?  To make smart business decisions for the future, you need to look at what already happened. Your company’s data can tell you everything you need to know to make better decisions for your business—as long as you know what you’re looking for. While the process of collecting and organizing data is critical, it’s how it’s analyzed and reported that makes data warehousing a valuable tool for businesses. How do you gain valuable insight into the changes, trends and performance of your company over time? > Meet a GoodData Customer Coupa Software, the fastest growing cloud-based spend optimization company, is using the GoodData platform to power its advanced spend analytics solution Coupa Spend Optimizer. “With GoodData we’re able make robust analytics available to the people who need it the most, the business user,” said Ravi Thakur, Vice President of Services and Support.  Learn how Coupa’s customers have unprecedented access to rich spend management and business intelligence. > Get the Real Story From Your Dashboard Your goal is to create reports and charts that represents your data in the most meaningful and actionable way. Choosing a report that obscures the information could be detrimental to your business. Guest blogger, Tara House, Director at Bluewolf, a global agile business consulting firm and GoodData Solutions Provider, shares 5 best practices for dashboard design. View examples of how report charts can be a distraction to the data. > The GoodData Team Every company has an evangelist. GoodData’s evangelist is Petr Olmer. Petr is on the Consulting Services team and works as a Solutions Architect. He works with customers like Time Warner Cable, Pandora Media and Enterasys, helping them to identify sound technical solutions for their business needs. Having spent 4 years at GoodData, Petr is all things GoodData and has a strong passion for modeling data, building metrics, and all technical training. Let the GoodData success team assist you with your ongoing analytics success. > [Less]

To make smart business decisions for the future, you need to look at what already happened. Your company’s data can tell you everything you need to know to make better decisions for your business—as long as you know what you’re looking for. ... [More] Businesses generate an enormous amount of information from multiple sources every second. And when that much data is being generated at record speed, there isn’t enough manpower in the world to keep track of it all. You have to look at your primary business goals to figure out what you need to know and then determine how to summarize that data. Data warehousing converts data into information by building the structure for intelligent analysis. As part of your computer-based Decision Support Systems (DSS), data warehouses collect and analyze every activity related to your business, from daily transactions to specific customer information. During the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process, data from multiple outside sources gets stored it in a warehouse repository to create a comprehensible, accessible history of your daily business transactions. While the process of collecting and organizing data is critical, it’s how it’s analyzed and reported that makes data warehousing a valuable tool for businesses. Data warehouses provide information about what already occurred so you can make better decisions for what’s to come. Businesses run on data-driven knowledge, and when you have access to your company's historical data, you gain valuable insight into the changes, trends and performance of your company over time. Imagine a dining experience at a restaurant as an analogy to a daily business report. The data warehouse is akin to what happens in sourcing, organizing and prepping the ingredients, cooking and sampling before it goes to the table. There’s no food on the plate without a data warehouse. What's your data warehouse analogy?   [Less]

The focus of  Release 71, was based on improving the current drill-in functionality by bringing you an impressive new feature that provides greater flexibility when defining various drill paths.  This enhancement enables you to break a metric or ... [More] attribute value down by a different attribute or you can even drill across from your original report into another report. In this example, we will setup a drill path that drills across to a Rep Scorecard report that indicated which rep has the highest win rate. Step One:  Within your dashboard, click on the  "Edit"  icon. Step Two: Click on the report wheel icon located on the top right.  Step Three: Select a metric (Won) and select the report we want create the drill path. Click "Apply." Step Four: Click on any of the bars in the chart that represent the metric we selected.   In Release 71, GoodData improved the core database technologies, which will bring about significant improvements in report computation and data loading performance.  Happy reporting!  [Less]

The focus of  Release 71, was based on improving the current drill-in functionality by bringing you an impressive new feature that provides greater flexibility when defining various drill paths.  This enhancement enables you to break a metric or ... [More] attribute value down by a different attribute or you can even drill across from your original report into another report. In this example, we will setup a drill path that drills across to a Rep Scorecard report that indicated which rep has the highest win rate. Step One:  Within your dashboard, click on the  "Edit"  icon. Step Two: Click on the report wheel icon located on the top right.  Step Three: Select a metric (Won) and select the report we want create the drill path. Click "Apply." Step Four: Click on any of the bars in the chart that represent the metric we selected.   In Release 71, GoodData improved the core database technologies, which will bring about significant improvements in report computation and data loading performance.  Happy reporting!  [Less]

This is a guest blog post written and contributed by Tara House, Director at Bluewolf, a global agile business consulting firm and GoodData Solutions Provider. In this post, Tara shares 5 best practices for dashboard design. "Not everything that ... [More] counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." - reads the sign in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton. Early in my career, I worked in the art department of a newspaper and was lucky enough to be mentored in the art of creating effective charts. The main goal was to ensure the chart type chosen was effective in communicating the data, not obscuring it, and to ensure the reader could see the “story” of the data quickly. The same rules apply in creating dashboards. I had the good fortune to work with GoodData very recently. This company helps convert big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives by offering a disruptive cloud-based enterprise business intelligence platform. We collaborated to show how effective investigation and counsel when envisioning a dashboard will give the executive more actionable information. In newspaper vernacular, it tells a story. For example, in a request for a dashboard to show the volume of Support Calls within a group, a basic chart would look like this (see the chart on the left). At first glance, it looks like Janice is not working up to par with her colleagues. However, let’s look at the same information in a different way (see chart on the right). Notice that instead of a single color bar chart, it is now a stacked, colored bar chart. A time element was also introduced. The stacked bar chart quickly shows that a major product issue cropped up this week. And in fact Janice is not avoiding work. She doesn’t work on product calls, but her colleagues do. There is an issue that must be dealt with by management. This illustration shows how by not choosing the proper report attributes and chart type, you can obscure the information that would be most meaningful and actionable to you, your staff and the business. Below are 5 best practices we at Bluewolf and GoodData counsel when we approach dashboard creation. Understand what attribute dimensions are most appropriate for your business or role, and which chart types will best visualize those dimensions. The best charts show comparative data. This can be historical, year over year, month over month, groupings or date progressions. Dashboards should be organized so that trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) stand out and are easily identifiable. The top left chart is usually the chart most people look at first in countries where written languages are left to right. Choose this chart carefully. Also, think about what charts will be seen when the dashboard is first clicked on. The most important charts should be seen in that first screen. Too many colors in a chart will be overwhelming to the reader and will occlude the message. Try another grouping instead. Keep background colors to a minimum. Titles should be descriptive and any assumptions clearly explained. Attribute filters, such as date ranges or territories, should be applied at the dashboard level rather than individual report level whenever possible. Albert Einstein had good reason to like the quote above. Data can be misleading, and you don’t want to be led to the wrong conclusions.   [Less]

This is a guest blog post written and contributed by Tara House, Director at Bluewolf, a global agile business consulting firm and GoodData Solutions Provider. In this post, Tara shares 5 best practices for dashboard design. "Not everything that ... [More] counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." - reads the sign in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton. Early in my career, I worked in the art department of a newspaper and was lucky enough to be mentored in the art of creating effective charts. The main goal was to ensure the chart type chosen was effective in communicating the data, not obscuring it, and to ensure the reader could see the “story” of the data quickly. The same rules apply in creating dashboards. I had the good fortune to work with GoodData very recently. This company helps convert big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives by offering a disruptive cloud-based enterprise business intelligence platform. We collaborated to show how effective investigation and counsel when envisioning a dashboard will give the executive more actionable information. In newspaper vernacular, it tells a story. For example, in a request for a dashboard to show the volume of Support Calls within a group, a basic chart would look like this (see the chart on the left). At first glance, it looks like Janice is not working up to par with her colleagues. However, let’s look at the same information in a different way (see chart on the right). Notice that instead of a single color bar chart, it is now a stacked, colored bar chart. A time element was also introduced. The stacked bar chart quickly shows that a major product issue cropped up this week. And in fact Janice is not avoiding work. She doesn’t work on product calls, but her colleagues do. There is an issue that must be dealt with by management. This illustration shows how by not choosing the proper report attributes and chart type, you can obscure the information that would be most meaningful and actionable to you, your staff and the business. Below are 5 best practices we at Bluewolf and GoodData counsel when we approach dashboard creation. Understand what attribute dimensions are most appropriate for your business or role, and which chart types will best visualize those dimensions. The best charts show comparative data. This can be historical, year over year, month over month, groupings or date progressions. Dashboards should be organized so that trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) stand out and are easily identifiable. The top left chart is usually the chart most people look at first in countries where written languages are left to right. Choose this chart carefully. Also, think about what charts will be seen when the dashboard is first clicked on. The most important charts should be seen in that first screen. Too many colors in a chart will be overwhelming to the reader and will occlude the message. Try another grouping instead. Keep background colors to a minimum. Titles should be descriptive and any assumptions clearly explained. Attribute filters, such as date ranges or territories, should be applied at the dashboard level rather than individual report level whenever possible. Albert Einstein had good reason to like the quote above. Data can be misleading, and you don’t want to be led to the wrong conclusions.   [Less]