LucidEra is an on-demand analytics company that seems to be growing fast, not least due to its integration with Salesforce.com through Appexchange. They sell mostly to mid size businesses with some departments at larger organizations. They emphasize simplicity, focused analytic applications and leveraging the CRM platforms companies already have.
I blogged about their first product before and now they have announced a lead conversion analytic application for salesforce.com and a pipeline health check. The pipeline healthcheck takes what they have learned from 50 or so organizations and aims to give sales managers to find some quick wins in the pipeline. The lead insight application emphasises visibility from lead to close with useful roll-ups and drill-downs.
Some thoughts:
- SaaS analytics is interesting.
Some companies are going all SaaS – meaning they want SaaS analytics – while others are being more pragmatic about SaaS – they don’t care particularly how the software is delivered they just care about start up costs, time to value, operating expense etc. I don’t see SaaS analytics replacing on-premise but complementing it as a result. - Helping organizations using SaaS applications to understand their data is key
SaaS users often have less IT and support infrastructure so packaged analytics help a lot. Being able to report and use data, especially sales data, will also improve its quality as sales people are notorious for only putting in what seems to come out in reports. So if you are going to do SaaS analytics I think packaged analytics will make a big difference.
The interesting next step for me is to see if this insight can be used to drive operational improvements. If the sales manager can see that leads contacted in less than 3 days have a 75% greater chance of converting than those contacted after that period (one of the packaged insights from LucidEra) then can this insight be turned into something that drives the reps call list, triggers alerts etc. Can LucidEra identify decisions that can be embedded in salesforce.com and enhanced using the analytic insights it is generating?
As an ex-salesforce user I find the LucidEra stuff very interesting – I would have found the reports and graphs very useful – but the idea that they might be able to feed this insight back into the processes being used by sales people and by marketing is even more so.
