• by Jess Nelson , September 1, 2016

Salesforce announced the release of an analytics platform Thursday, extending its portfolio to B2B marketers.  

The Wave for B2B Marketing application provides a visual, interactive dashboard. It gives marketers a view of online company metrics, including lead volume, conversion rates and campaign return on investment.

Marketers can then click on specific data sets to analyze specific types of data, allowing them to pinpoint the areas of marketing that might need to be strengthened to reach company goals.

“Marketers don’t need the data,” says Shannon Duffy, vice president of marketing at Pardot, Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation software. “The data already exists -- the problem is that we need the actual insights to make data-driven decisions.”

Duffy told Email Marketing Daily that the tool is structured to glean insights from data, including bar and pie charts. A Dataset Designer also allows companies to visually combine sets of data to customize metrics for a specific industry or business.

For example, a marketer might see that their company’s performance in the Northeast is faltering compared to other geographic areas in the United States. A marketer can then click on the Northeast in their dashboard to access a view of their company’s pipeline by region, zooming in on marketing metrics specific to that area, such as budget or events.

“B2B marketing isn’t just about marketing,” says Duffy. “Its about marketing and sales working together to close a prospect.” 

It’s also lets marketers set up push notifications for alerts when a prospect takes a certain action in real-time from Salesforce Engage. The push notification will include a link to a history of the prospect’s interactions with the company and contact information, so a marketer could could choose to call the prospect immediately or assign them to a specific nurture campaign to continue to deliver a steady stream of marketing content, all from within the mobile Wave Analytics app.

Nineteen Wave Apps are available from Salesforce’s partner ecosystem of third-party software vendors, including applications from Everis, ThinkLP and Vlocity.

Everis ehCOS Wave Analytics is a specialized platform for health service workers, ThinkLP Loss Prevention Analytics allows retailers to identify inventory loss patterns and Vlocity Clickstream Analysis is a tool for the telecommunications industry that provides detailed data for customer service representatives.