Visualize and Map SalesForce Leads with SpatialKey - Part I
Create powerful interactive maps and dashboards to visually analyze the location and time information in your SalesForce.com data. Use interactive heatmaps and timelines to visualize and understand your CRM data better than ever before.This is Part I of a two part article. This article covers the import process and Part II covers building reports with SpatialKey
SalesForce is excellent at managing workflows and data related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), including Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Campaigns, and Accounts. SalesForce also provides many “out of the box” reports that summarizes this information. Like many reporting system, SalesForce stops short of providing rich visualization or analysis of the location and time data contained in these data points. For example, inside of a SalesForce report, you can filter and group by address information like postal code, state, country - just like you can any other field. However, there is significant benefit to visualizing and understanding the location trends in your data with greater detail and interactivity. Can you answer questions like: Which leads sources are doing best in which parts of the city or state? How is this changing over time? Is my campaign working better in some regions than others?
Fortunately, SalesForce makes it easy to export your tabular reports so that they can be brought into SpatialKey for rich analysis. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to export your SalesForce data into SpatialKey. In Part II, we’ll show you how easy it is to create powerful interactive reports to gain new insights into your SalesForce data.
In just a few minutes, you can import tabular SalesForce data into SpatialKey and produce rich interactive reports that include heatmaps, timelines and various pods that report on and filter any of the attributes in your report.
More of a watcher than a reader? This four minute video walks through this process.
Part I. Exporting your SalesForce Report and Importing it into SpatialKey
SpatialKey can work with just about and comma separated value (CSV) file from any source. Specifically, any tabular report in SalesForce can be exported as a CSV file. This could include reports regarding Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Campaigns, or Accounts. While SpatialKey will really shine when these reports contain columns that include location fields (like Address, City, State/Province, and Country) and date/time fields (like Created Date and Last Modified Date), you can actually use SpatialKey to analyze data without location and time information.
In this tutorial, we are going to export a tabular report of Leads containing the following fields: capture date (a custom date field), Industry, Company / Account, Lead Source, Lead Status, City, State/Province, Rating, Annual Revenue, No. of Employees, and Lead Owner Alias.
Note: The Lead data used in this article was programmatically generated for demonstrated for demonstration purposes. If you’d like to see this sample file, you can download it here. You can even upload this file directly into SpatialKey before trying with your own data.
1. SalesForce makes exporting your data easy. Simply click the “Export Details” button to begin the export process.
2. Then, select “Comma Delimited .csv” from the dropdown, and click Export.
3. Depending on how your browser is configured, when you click “Export” you may either see the raw CSV data in your browser or the CSV file may be opened in the application that is associated with CSV files. In this case, we have associated Microsoft Excel with CSV files, so the file is opened in Microsoft Excel.
4. Before you can import your data into SpatialKey, there is one small change you will need to make. The SalesForce export places some extra text about the file at the bottom of the CSV. This information needs to be removed before importing into SpatialKey. You can delete these extra lines from within Microsoft Excel, or any text editor. Once you have removed these lines, save the file (using the same name and location).
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5. Now, load SpatialKey in your browser and from the datasets tab, click the “Upload a Dataset” button. This will start the process which will import your SalesForce report into SpatialKey in minutes flat.
6. First, you’ll be asked to locate the file you’d like to import. Select the file you just saved.
7. Once you select the file, SpatialKey will upload the file. First, it will ask you to name the new dataset. By default, we’ll use the name of the CSV file. In this case, we’ll change the name to something more interesting.
8. Next, you’ll see the data you just uploaded. This should look similar to how the data looked in your tabular report on the SalesForce website, or to how in looked in Excel.
9. SpatialKey looks at your data to determine the type of data in each column. In most cases, we do a pretty good job of guessing this information. You should look at each of the choices SpatialKey made, and make any corrections.
10. In the next step, SpatialKey asks you how to find the location fields in your data. In our case, we want to use the city and postal code columns contain the location information. So we click “Geocode using address fields.”
11. Once you’ve selected the “Geocode using address fields” option, SpatialKey tries to determine which fields contain the location information. SpatialKey usually does a good job finding the right columns, but you can always make any corrections. In this case, SpatialKey correctly determined that the two columns useful for geocoding are “City” as the City and “StateProvince” as the State.
12. Now, SpatialKey has everything it needs to create the dataset. Each of your records are geocoded (assigned a latitude and longitude) based on the location information provided, and the dataset is created.
13. SpatialKey reports back the quality of the geocoding. In these case, each record geocoded to the “city” level, which is perfect for our data. If some of our records geocoded with poorer quality (for example, if city names were in our report that did not actually exist) we could chose to exclude those records.
14. SpatialKey makes it easy to share your data and reports with other members of your organization. As a final step, we ask you if you want to share the dataset right away. You can always change this later. We’ll share this data with everybody.
15. With the dataset imported, geocoding quality reported, and sharing options set, now we can start working with our data in a report.
16. SpatialKey provides a number of reporting “templates” to make creating a report easy. Select “Full Screen Map” and then “Start” to create a highly useful map instantly.
17. The “Full Screen Map” shows you the distribution of all the Leads from SalesForce on map. While this itself is pretty powerful, it just scratches the surface!
In Part II of this tutorial, we will show some of the reports you can create in seconds with SpatialKey using this dataset imported from SalesForce.
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