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Ah the good old eighties. Yuppies, the FiloFax and it's when Harry met Sally. Oh, and people were using spreadsheets to run their businesses. Very progressive.
This post was inspired by a tweet I received after posting a recent Anaplan article last week, (SFDC vs Anaplan) outlining the differences between how Anaplan and salesforce.com perform sales forecasting. I'd like to genuinely thank that consultant, (who shall remain nameless), for inspiring me to outline how mis-understood forecasting sales and financial information is, especially in the CRM community and around how people think salesforce.com does it.
I am starting to notice a pattern here. As we talk to the ever-growing group of salesforce.com users, I am often asked what kind of "reports and dashboards" can you produce? Perhaps they ask for these static views of their data because that is what they are used to. Or maybe they are hoping to take the data deluge and turn it into something that is manageable. Regardless, what they get carries inherent latency and may well be out of synch with the current situation.