When you’re stuck using basic salesforce reporting or your marketing automation platform, it ends up limiting the extent of the insights you can create from the data.
Of course, you can always play the export to excel and vlookup game, but the tolerance for that, and room for error tends to make that a practice reserved for only special circumstances.
If you’re resourceful, you’ve pushed the power of salesforce reports to their absolute limits, in an effort to maintaining live, easily accessible data and dashboards. But as marketing reporting requirements get more complex, Salesforce ends up outclassed for all but the most basic requests.
Companies talk a lot about data warehouses and BI, but rarely do they have systems accessible to business users to build on. It’s all well and good to want to build a central BI team to be the curators of insights, but without democratized access, this strategy ends up just creating dependence and eventually resentment from departments who want to move quickly.
The first hurdle in building a more data-driven marketing organization is to centralize insights in a common, organization wide data warehouse. But the second hurdle, arguably more difficult, is to make that data resource accessible and useable by the average user. The first step is more visible and flashy. But the second step is the one that actually matters.