Auto Insights Tracks Software Sales Account Health

[rachel_k]

Identify trends and share them with your stakeholders in minutes

Alteryx Auto Insights is a cloud-native analytics solution that automates the process of finding insights, so business users can make data-led decisions.  The use case below helps software company sales and customer success teams track license utilization and account health – but applications are endless with Alteryx Auto Insights. 

The scenario: You’re a software industry sales leader.  Tracking active licenses can predict revenue expansion, customer churn, and overall account health – but you don’t have time or staff support to track licensing or do complex analyses.

Luckily, you have a secret weapon – Alteryx Auto Insights.  Go from data trapped in complex databases to ready-made communications and insights that matter:

Here’s how:

The Data

In this synthetic dataset (attached at the end of this article), there is a row for each day of license activation for each user.  There are also columns for their email address, company, region (Americas, EMEA, APJ), zone (sub-territory of region), industry, business size, product, and sales representative.  This data would typically come from your software licensing database and CRM database.

Pro Tip: Auto Insights works best with long datasets – with one row per transaction.  In this case, a transaction is one day of license activation per user.  To get the data into that format using a SQL query, join: 1) the license use data set with one row per user per product and a column for activation start and activation end to 2) a table of calendar dates with a where statement to include dates between the activation and deactivation.

Another method is to use the Generate Rows tool in Alteryx Designer to create a new row for each day between USER_ACTIVATION_DATE and USER_DEACTIVATION_DATE. Here’s how to configure the Generate Rows tool to do that in Designer Desktop:

Step 1: Connect to your Data

First, get access to licensing data and load the data into Auto Insights (here are instructions to load data).  This may require pairing with IT/Data Engineering and the Organization Administrator for Auto Insights.  The person creating the dataset in Auto Insights will need either Administrator or Organization Administrator role.

Connecting directly to a database source is a one-time process. If the data is messy or multiple data sources must be combined, reach out to the Alteryx Professional Services team for help!

Once this step is done, analyzing data and creating communications takes 5 minutes or less.

Step 2: Create an Auto Insights Mission

Log into Alteryx Auto Insights. On the home page, select the purple KPI Deep Dive Report template (15 second setup).

Select the dataset and measure.  In this case, select “Number of User ID,” which corresponds to the number of active license holders per day.

Press Create Mission, and then view the results.  It’s seriously that easy. If desired, you may customize each page of the mission, but that’s not a requirement.

Step 3: Let AI Build Your Communications Using Magic Documents

Select Magic Documents in the top left panel of your mission.

Select the type of communication, audience, and preferred language. 

Press the blue “Generate presentation” button and let Alteryx Auto Insights and AI do the rest.

In about a minute, a complete presentation will be generated.  Download it immediately, or customize it further by pressing the pencil button to edit in the left-hand panel.

The Result

In three easy steps and less than 5 minutes, a customizable KPI mission in Auto Insights, a slide deck for presentations, and talking points to go along with each slide were generated. 

Now, easily dive into overall license use, identify which customers have increased or decreased seat count, and look at trends based on individual products, regions, or sales staff – and effectively share those findings with others.

Instead of relying on customer feedback or trying to decipher weeks upon weeks of individual license data locked in a database and then paired with a CRM, focus your time on what matters most – identifying and servicing the accounts/regions/products/sales staff that most need attention.

Take It Further

• Share the dataset—you could share it with sales, product, customer success, or other teams so they can self-service their own data reporting.  If needed, use row-level permissions to control which users have access to which data (learn more).
• Update the mission—the mission updates as the data updates.  To update a Magic Document for the next month-end or quarter-end, navigate to your mission, click the Magic Document Tab, and just press “Regenerate Document” (learn more).
• Fold in more information – add marketing, support staffing, call center log, or other data to unlock even more insights from the data.

About Alteryx Auto Insights

Alteryx Auto Insights is a cloud-native analytics solution that automates the process of finding insights so business users can make data-led decisions. Industry and use-case agnostic, Alteryx Auto Insights is much more than a visualization tool requiring analyst expertise.  Instead, Alteryx Auto Insights uniquely combines features to deliver automated end-to-end insights for the business: (1) Data discovery – no need to ask a question, (2) Root cause analysis – dive deeper in an instant, (3) Storytelling – insights that rival humans – all automated without any complex setup or build.

About Alteryx Professional Services

The Alteryx Professional Services team is a group of trusted advisors who can assist you as you define, develop, and execute your vision for the Alteryx platform.  We can help accelerate your analytics capabilities through deployment and migration, creating process control and governance frameworks, building automation efficiencies, or developing custom analytic solutions.  Get in touch if you want help on your analytic journey!