Bonus Material: FREE Salesforce KPIs Cheat Sheet (along with the SQL code you need) PDF
“Our team had no dedicated analytics infrastructure with siloed business performance data. So we had to do a ton of detective work between excel sheets and ad-hoc platforms with no unified picture across the business.”
Sounds familiar?
Sales and Business executives in growth-oriented organizations lie awake at night, thinking about how to attain predictable and scalable revenue growth.
For Sales Teams, Salesforce is a platform they can’t live without. Their next step is to bring into Salesforce more data that their team needs to do their job. That means sales data has to be seen alongside data from other systems, such as billing, marketing, product, or support.
So, what do you need to make this happen?
How to Integrate Salesforce with your Data Warehouse
It usually comes to the discussion of using a data warehouse as the point of collecting all data from multiple and sparse data sources. At the same time naturally arises the question of why not using Salesforce as that cloud-based data warehouse.
So before discussing how to Integrate Salesforce with your Data Warehouse, let’s see what you may not need first.
Salesforce is not a data warehouse – It is not the right place to store and aggregate data from across your business. Imagine getting into Salesforce data from Marketo, Zendesk, NetSuite, or custom product usage data. You may get with it with some data that are necessary for your teams… Still, it will never scale to a full-fledged solution.
So…
Can I use Salesforce as a cloud-based Data Warehouse?
Yes and No, but No.
Yes, you may store the necessary data for your sales reps and agents. Still, you should start getting concern on the cost of data storage, flexibility on combining different data, and in that, in the end, Salesforce is not a Data Warehousing solution. Salesforce is not designed to handle reporting and analytics. That is why data warehousing and Business Intelligence tools are for.
Cases like combining data from multiple sources, creating custom reports, archiving data for historical reasons, and uncovering trends are traditional data analytics use cases.
I hear what you think now, “I have no team for building Salesforce integrations with my data warehouse, it takes time, and in Salesforce, I can create my reports.”
One of our customers recently quoted that “Without IT, I was surprised how easy it was to get the 1-click integrations piping all the relevant info into our data warehouse.”
OK, now you got a cloud-based data warehouse. Are you done?
You need something that can ETL from Salesforce to your data warehouse – whatever database you use
To get your data from Salesforce.com to your data warehouse, you will need to build the data infrastructure to support such integration. Such data integrations can take weeks to months to make comprehensively and correctly.
Also, it will require many working hours in data modeling, a complicated source like Salesforce. You may even end up with scripts that will provide partial information, always in lag, and maybe poor data quality.
Here is where a solution like Blendo fits.
Blendo is a data infrastructure as a service solution, an ELT platform that enables organizations to pull together data from disparate silos into their data warehouse and reducing data movement. As a result, organizations can accelerate queries without managing the underlying infrastructure.
What are the differences between ETL vs. ELT
Get All the Salesforce Integrations You Need with Blendo
Blendo is a Salesforce integration tool that you can bring Salesforce.com, Salesforce Pardot marketing automation, and all your other essential business data into any database.
Click here to get our FREE 20+ page PDF Salesforce KPIs Cheat Sheet!
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is one of the most popular data warehousing solutions, which is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem. It is a petabyte-scale, fully managed data warehouse as a service solution that runs in the cloud.
You will definitively need some work on managing it, but it returns in value.
Blendo is an Amazon APN Technology partner | Click here and download our free ebook: Amazon Redshift Guide for Data Analysts
Google Bigquery
Google BigQuery is Google’s (part of Google Cloud) serverless, highly scalable, low-cost enterprise data warehouse designed to make all your data analysts productive. Because there is no infrastructure to manage, you can focus on analyzing data to find meaningful insights using familiar SQL, and you don’t need a database administrator.
If you want to build a reliable data warehouse quickly and you are on the edge of choosing, you may read our Amazon Redshift vs. Google BigQuery guide.
Blendo is a Google Cloud Technology Partner.
SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server is one of the oldest and most mature database systems. SQL Server is delivered in different editions or flavors. You may use MS SQL server as onsite, in Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud, or AWS.
Here too, you will need to manage your instances though it is widely accepted as a great data warehouse for analytics purposes and companies large and small use it.
You can now connect behind private networks with an SSH tunnel.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is one of the most well known, popular, and well-supported databases. Amazon Redshift is based on an earlier version of PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL can scale to pretty large datasets and makes it an ideal database for analytics-related tasks.
Blendo is an Amazon APN Technology partner.
Are you using PostgreSQL as your product database? You can sync PostgreSQL to another PostgreSQL instance for analytical reasons.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a data warehouse built specifically for the cloud. Snowflake has a unique architecture that allows compute and storage to scale independently, instantly.
Moreover, the infrastructure, availability, scalability, and security are all automatically taken care of. That allows you to focus on digging deeper into the data instead of managing it.
Blendo is a Snowflake Technology partner | Snowflake ETL: Tools and Ways to Get Started
Panoply
Panoply provides end-to-end data management-as-a-service. It can quickly set up a managed data warehouse and scale it without you having to deal with managing your analytical infrastructure. From Panoply, you can view, process, and query your data. Panoply also handles maintenance tasks like vacuuming and backup, optimizes your queries, and more.
Blendo is a Panoply partner.
Choose your data warehouse
Your digital analytics will need a data warehouse. Any data warehouse can fit your needs and meet in certain stages of your company.
Having a data infrastructure with Blendo can help you choose any of the above solutions undistracted and with the certainty that you can scale.
Business Intelligence With Blendo
In the end, whatever the data warehouse, companies want to have all data sources available for their analytics teams. Those are the people that will need to understand the factors that affect your business metrics like churn. Leadership will need to enable them with Salesforce integration tools that will make their work faster and reliable, so the corporate decisions will not be outdated or obsolete.
Bring your sales and customer data together on your data warehouse – including email marketing services, CRM systems like Salesforce CRM, ad technologies, analytics from your web app, and more.
Blendo will support you across the data journey so you can collect your data with ease, and run analyses in seconds without a server setup. Finally, you will need to visualize it with the dashboard and business intelligence tool you prefer. That will enable your company to uncover insights to understand the customer journey, drive better campaign results, and offer better customer experience.
Whichever tool you use, Blendo is vendor agnostic.
We are partnering with BI tools so you can have your Pardot Salesforce integrations and rest of business data in Looker, Sisense, Chartio, Yellowfin. Of course, you can use tools like Microsoft Power BI, Google Data Studio, or Tableau.
With Blendo, you can integrate any data source, within minutes, without having to write any code, designed to offer self-serve analytics-ready data in modern data warehouses. Don’t hesitate to contact us and try Blendo for free.
