We love apps like Fitbit, Mint, and Nest, because they help us measure ourselves. They help us quickly understand our own behavior, like our steps, our budget, or how we are using energy to heat or cool our house. With that information we can make adjustments that help us reach our goals, and receive recommendations about what patterns we can lean into to become better.

Now sales teams are using analytics apps to measure everything they do, and get smarter about how they do it all. According to a benchmark study Salesforce ran last year, the State of Sales report, high performing sales organizations are 3.5X more likely to use analytics than under performers. With the new Wave App for Sales — a totally redesigned analytics application that’s optimized for sales reps, managers and leaders, it’s easier than ever to use analytics for Sales. It’s purpose-built to help sales teams focus on doing their job, rather than searching through spreadsheets to find what they need.

Sales reps care about one thing: hitting quotas. With Wave for Sales, reps can monitor KPIs such as quota attainment, bookings, open pipe amount, completed activities and pipe coverage while focusing on opportunities that need the most attention. If there’s not enough in the pipeline, Wave for Sales helps them look across accounts and products to identify whitespace, as well as cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Reps can create and update opportunities, log tasks or even Chatter their managers without ever leaving the app.

Sales Rep Whitespace Dashboard

Sales managers are focused on helping their teams hit the right numbers. With Wave for Sales, they get an overview of team performance against key KPIs like quota attainment, pipe generation, bookings and sales cycle — as well as how each member of the team ranks against those metrics. Managers can use Wave for Sales to track how team pipeline is changing over time so they can focus on opportunities that have been pushed, reduced or lost.

Sales leaders and operations want to sell more. With Wave for Sales, leaders can look at business across geographies, customer types and products. They can also monitor key KPIs such as booked business, year-over-year, and quarter-over-quarter growth by product, channel, segment or industry.

Sales reps are always busy, so it can be challenging to get them to track everything managers need them to. That’s why managers are embedding Wave for Sales in each rep’s homepage within Salesforce. It’s designed to live there, offering them new views into their accounts and opportunities, and making it easier to use because it's the first thing they see at login.

Wave for Sales is more extensible, works better with external data, and offers new dashboard and dataset designer capabilities that can help your Wave administrators delver unexpected answers. With richer datasets they can build apps for everyone in sales who needs become a trusted advisor and deliver business impact.

Wave for Sales is helping organizations in every industry sell smarter because they can now:

• Extend custom apps with conditional formatting, notifications and alerts, and bring data to the user with smart notifications.
• Create new datasets — or visually mash up any combination of datasets — with the Dataset Designer. It’s the fastest way to deliver new metrics and visualizations to every Wave user, across data from any source.
• Build out amazing new business views with objects like Leads and Campaigns that are natively included within Wave for Sales dataflows.  
• Enhance every view of the business through standard fields on Opportunities and Accounts without customizing your dataflows.

Dashboard Designer

Dataset Designer

Wave for Sales customers are starting to see tremendous momentum: companies like Black Duck Software, xMatters, and Accenture are becoming measurably more efficient with Wave for Sales. For Black Duck, an open source security management company, the ability to slice and dice data, drill into records, and take action in Salesforce has been a game changer. Sales ops no longer questions data, because a single source of truth has been created within Wave for Sales. And it sits right on top of Sales Cloud, where their sales teams work every day.

xMatters’ Pipeline Trending dashboard is providing the kind of visibility their sales managers and executives were looking for. No longer exporting data from Salesforce and performing analysis in other tools, xMatters has achieved huge time savings and improvements in data quality and gave its sales teams the insights they needed to make smarter decisions, faster.

And finally, Accenture is putting insights right where its sales reps — called Client Teams — work. By embedding Wave insights right in the Sales Cloud account record, client teams instantly have the insights they need to make smarter customer decisions. In this way, Accenture is empowering its service team to become trusted advisors with deep understanding of customers needs and the ability to deliver solutions that address those challenges.

Sales is so hyper-competitive that it encourages aggressive innovation. And companies like Black Duck, xMatters and Accenture are leading the charge towards the universal use of sales apps. As they start to see the tangible benefits of their sales teams selling smarter and becoming trusted customer advisors, it’s only a matter of time until sales organizations everywhere realize that they need to do more to measure up.