Ah, a brand new year. The perfect time to drop all of your bad habits, revolutionize your productivity, and become the booming Salesforce-based business you were always meant to be. Right?

If the new year ushers in more anxiety than excitement, and/or if you’re serious about creating measurable growth for your business in the coming year, it might be time to engage in some critical business analysis to identify trends in your company’s performance. 

You need more than your instincts here — you need data. Armed with data-backed knowledge, you can invest in and further improve successful areas while also identifying the elements of your business that need some extra attention in the new year. But getting to the heart of how your business currently operates is going to take a little elbow grease. 

The good news is that Salesforce makes it easy to access a lot of the info that you need in order to conduct a thorough and accurate business analysis. And, if you’ve been on the Salesforce platform for any length of time (as well as taking good care of your Salesforce org and following best data quality practices), you know the data you pull is trustworthy. 

Now for the nitty gritty. 

Analyzing Your Company’s Performance

Analyzing your business's performance is perhaps the most crucial step in delivering on continuous improvement, but it’s a pretty open-ended assignment. To make it feel less overwhelming, we’ve assembled a comprehensive guide to help you analyze your business's performance and guide your planning and decision-making. 

As you begin this process, there are a few high-level areas to consider first: 

• What are your primary business goals for the upcoming year?
• How did you perform against your goals in the previous year?
• What market trends and industry changes should you be aware of?

Operational Analysis

Salesforce truly excels in delivering rich, powerful data — from custom objects and fields to customer journey mapping, to process automation and case management. If you can dream it, you (or your consulting team) can build it in Salesforce, then create the report that delivers that sweet, sweet data. 

To get to the heart of that data and how your business performed last year, we recommend taking these steps: 

1. Sales Performance

Your existing sales data can be mapped against specific sales and marketing initiatives to gauge their effectiveness, and the information you gather will help you hone in your approach to be even more relevant, helpful, and enticing to your target audiences. 

• Tap into your sales data from the past year to identify trends in purchasing, which can offer helpful insights into your customer’s behavior and purchasing preferences. 
• When are our peak seasons? 
• Are certain groups more likely to buy one type of service/product over another? 

2. Customer Analysis

‍While assessing sales performance can help determine your level of success on a quantitative level, reviewing anecdotes from customer feedback and satisfaction surveys brings in a much-needed human element. These stories will help further crystallize where you can improve your customers’ experience and identify which offerings they already love.

• As you sort through your customer’s stories, identify your most valuable and engaged customers — are you meeting their needs? 
• Consider how you can continue to make them feel valued in the coming year. 

3. Employee Performance

‍Slack’s 2023 The State of Work survey found that more than 82% of respondents reported that feeling happy and engaged are the key drivers of their productivity. 

• It’s a good idea to devote time to collecting feedback from your employees at the end of every year to determine how you can make them feel motivated and valued in their working environment.
• If you didn’t do that last year, do it now! 
• Don’t forget to consider the past year’s training and professional development initiatives to determine their impact and usefulness.  

Additional questions: 

• How can you streamline your internal processes to improve efficiency?
• What skills and knowledge do your employees need to succeed in the changing business landscape?

Market Analysis

Salesforce can be a valuable tool for conducting market analysis for your business by providing insights into customer behavior, market trends, and competitor activities (particularly when combined with Account Engagement). 

Whether it's lead and opportunity management, customer segmentation, competitor analysis, or a long list of other critical marketing activities, what should you consider during the market stage of your business analysis? 

1. Competitive Analysis

‍It’s not enough to keep tabs on your own performance — you need to keep track of how well your competitors performed over the past year as well, and understand the advantages and weak points in their offerings. 

• Use these insights to further solidify your business’ unique selling points to differentiate and win new customers — what can you deliver that similar businesses cannot? 

2. Industry Trends

‍In order to stay competitive and relevant in your field, you should regularly research the latest advancements, demands, and technology changes associated with your field. 

• While there are benefits to a “tried-and-true” approach, your customers trust you to be an expert in what you do, and that includes adapting to their changing needs and shifting industry standards. 
• This research can also be useful in identifying emerging threats and opportunities for your business — both in the form of competing businesses or industry-wide challenges, such as supply chain struggles.  

Additional questions: 

• Who are your target customers, and have their needs/preferences evolved?
• What feedback have you received from existing customers?
• Are there untapped markets or new customer segments you should explore?
• What marketing strategies were most effective last year, and how can you build on them?
• How can you enhance your lead generation and conversion processes?

Technology and Systems Analysis

If you aren’t utilizing Salesforce APIs and development tools to build custom integrations and applications, you’re missing out — especially if you have specific technology requirements that can't be addressed with off-the-shelf solutions. It’s a great way to minimize your tech stack to improve both performance and safety. 

For this portion of our analysis, consider the following to determine if your technology or systems need additional attention: 

1. IT Infrastructure

‍Your business’ technology powers your operations and influences how well you can assess your performance throughout the year. 

• What is the reliability and sophistication of your existing IT systems?
• Can you identify areas where upgrading your equipment or software would fill a gap or better meet existing needs?

2. Data Security

‍As mentioned earlier, security is paramount. From confidential medical details governed by HIPAA to data classification to their credit card information, your customers trust you to keep their data safe from ill-intentioned parties. 

• Take the end of the year as an opportunity to review and update your data security measures and ensure you’re remaining compliant with all relevant regulations.  

Additional questions: 

• Is our tech stack robust enough to support our growth?
• Do we anticipate needing additional solutions in our tech stack in the coming year? Have we vetted our options yet? 

Financial Analysis

Salesforce itself doesn't have built-in financial analysis features like dedicated accounting or financial software, but it easily integrates with those solutions to give you on-platform tools that help you gather, organize, and analyze your financial data — and it plays a key role in tracking revenue. 

For your financial analysis, we suggest looking at:

1. Revenue and Profitability

Start your assessment by comparing your revenue and profits from last year with totals from previous years. Comparing these total figures will give you a high-level idea of how your company is growing.

• From there, stratify revenue according to an individual product or service to identify both top- and underperforming areas.
• You can then determine the best steps to address any pain points you find. 

2. Cash Flow and Expenses

‍Once you’ve got a baseline for how your company has grown, review the past years’ cash flow and expenses. 

• Your business’ cash flow statement can be used to gauge your company’s liquidity, target problem areas within your cash flow, and determine their causes. 

• Categorizing each expense helps identify areas where you’re potentially overspending, as well as opportunities to cut costs entirely now that you have the perspective on their impact throughout the year. 
• Consider how you can avoid repeating unexpected expenses that are impacting your profitability. 

3. Budget vs. Actual

‍Sit down with your initial budget for the year and assess the accuracy of your financial planning. 

• Take the opportunity to identify which areas differed the most, and meet with the relevant groups and departments to determine why that might be the case. 

These steps will help further hone your budgeting accuracy and give you food for thought as you build the upcoming year’s budget. 

Additional questions:

• What are the key financial metrics you should focus on to gauge success? 
• Are there opportunities for cost optimization without compromising quality?

Reporting and Improvements (aka What’s Next?)

Now that you’ve drawn your conclusions about your business’ performance over the previous year, your next question to answer is: How much manual work was required in order to draw these conclusions? 

If the answer is anything but “not much,” we need to have a chat about value realization and building a solid solution as your foundation. A good business analysis exercise uses a combination of financial, operational, market, and strategic analyses to give you a comprehensive understanding of your business's performance, but that elbow grease mentioned at the beginning of this blog shouldn’t be literal — your Salesforce solution should do most of the work for you. 

Maybe you need a savvy flow to create a bespoke process for your customers, a round robin to optimize your Sales team’s lead follow-up efforts, or custom engineering to improve performance — the possibilities are endless, but you need a solid foundation to build the right solution for your business and effectively report on your business’s performance.

For next steps, ask yourself:

• Which data points gave you the most comprehensive view of how you performed over the past year? 
• How can you use your findings to make improvements to existing business strategies? 
• How can you make this whole process easier to repeat, so that you can do it easily throughout the year?

We hope our recommendations on how to conduct a business analysis are helpful to you. If the process feels overwhelming, though, or you know that you just don’t have access to the data you need with your current setup, drop us a line! We’re committed to creating real value for you and your business — we’ve got a long track record of delivering scalable solutions that serve our customers well, and we’re eager to help you succeed as well. Simply fill out the Contact Us form at the bottom of this page, or use the chat box to speak directly with CEO Kenny Goldman (that’s for real — he looks at every single message).

Asking the right questions and digging into the data can inform your business decisions in truly powerful ways. We wish you all the best on your journey toward success!