CRM Analytics Snapshotting:
Find Trends and Patterns in your Data

What is Snapshotting?

A snapshot is a full-volume copy of data at a particular point in time and allows users to capture periodic point-in-time summaries across various data types.

Snapshotting data can be a potent tool in Salesforce CRM Analytics. In this article, we’ll look at standard method to set up snapshotting and create the datasets required for reporting.

CRM Analytics Snapshotting Use Case

Recently, we had a business case to track the open and closed opportunities, along with their “Opportunity Type” and Revenue flow.

In other words, the client wanted to track the opportunity movement in their pipeline to see progress, and to analyze the flow of opportunities to get a better understanding of the status that would help them to compare and take certain decisions. Also, they can track product addition or deletion for upselling in the products in an opportunity.

It’s interesting to see how we can track all of these considering the current Salesforce system cannot enable the history tracking on the custom fields or on products. But there are limitations to implement these with the existing setup. Let’s describe how we could achieve these by using the power of Snapshotting — and some custom data flows — to tailor the solutions and get the expected insights.

CRM Analytics Snapshotting Step-by-Step

First, we need to track the open and closed opportunities along with their ‘Opportunity Type’ and Revenue flow and products details.

We do this by using the standard method to create a snapshot analytics application. This application helps us create the snapshot dataset captures the entire volume of data based on the stage or type change in any opportunity. Then, we setup the application by selecting an object along with all the necessary metrics to track. In this case, because we are dealing with Opportunity, we need to select the parent object as “Opportunity” and required filed and child object as “Opportunity Field History” to capture the old and new values for opportunity stage and type.

Setting up snapshotting is a one-time process. It’s even quicker if you have existing datasets in EA. In this case, we are starting it from scratch.

Snapshot Analytics application creates a setup, including dataflow, snapshot dataset, and report, along with the report to track these dimensions and metrics based on the snapshot date.

Snapshot Date is the application run date that captures all the opportunities with stage or type change as on run date.

For example, if we run the application on January 1, 2022, then all the opportunities with stage or type movement would be captured as of Jan 1, 2022, in the first snapshot data. Similarly, if we run on February 1, 2022, then all the opportunities with stage or type movement would be captured as of February 1, 2022.

Before along with meeting the expected requirements, we want to create a custom report as we also want to capture the product related information. We create a recipe to retrieve the “ProductLineItem” object to retrieve the products detail and tailoring that with the snapshot data for the reporting purpose.

Snapshot dataset is used along with the product field history to capture the product related information along with the opportunity stage and type movement with revenues.

Snapshot Dashboards 

Custom dashboards can be built based on the requirement and snapshot data will analyze the data and trends based on the snapshot captured dates.

The snapshot dataset is extremely powerful because you can create custom dashboards to compare the previous and current state of many data metrics and trends.

With CRM Analytics Snapshotting, we capture the Revenue Metrics and Stage and Type flow of opportunities between current and previous state. The custom dashboard captures the change in revenues and flow of opportunities in pipeline along with the product related information to track the Revenue flow and opportunity journey tracking.

Here, we’ve captured the change in revenue and new open opportunities with the stage or type change.

This also tracks the opportunities which are at risk, so necessary actions can be made. This also tracks the opportunities that might require more attention considering the journey in the pipeline.

In the custom dashboard, we captured the revenue flow, stage, and type flow compared to current and previous snapshots dates. Users can select any two snapshot dates to compare and track the flow of opportunities.

This gives a clear picture on the delta change compared to the previous snapshot.

About Decision Foundry

Decision Foundry is a Salesforce, independent software vendor, managed services provider, and a certified award-winning Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration partner. Decision Foundry closes the gap between data accessibility, platform adoption and business impact. Our consulting services include the integration of Data Cloud, Account, Engagement, Personalization, Tableau, and Intelligence.