Unlocking Business Insights: How Snowflake, Salesforce, and Modern Reporting Tools Empower Non-Technical Users

In the modern business landscape, leveraging data is crucial for making informed decisions. Two of the most powerful platforms that help businesses do this are Snowflake and Salesforce, but understanding how they work together and the reporting tools that can be used with them can be daunting, especially for non-technical users. This guide will break down the role of Snowflake, Salesforce, and various reporting tools—including Looker, Qlik Sense, Tableau, and Salesforce CRM Analytics (CRMA)—so you can better understand how they enable data-driven decision-making.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform designed for managing, storing, and analyzing vast amounts of data. Unlike traditional databases, Snowflake is cloud-native and can scale up or down depending on business needs.

• Business Impact: Snowflake is used to store and manage all your business data, including customer information, sales data, marketing data, and more. It’s a flexible and efficient tool that powers advanced data analysis and insights.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that helps companies manage customer interactions, sales, and service operations. Salesforce enables businesses to track customer data, manage leads, and automate parts of the sales process.

• Business Impact: Salesforce CRM helps teams improve customer relationships, increase sales, and streamline processes. It’s a one-stop shop for managing all customer-related activities and data.

Salesforce CRM Analytics (CRMA)

Salesforce CRM Analytics (CRMA) (formerly known as Einstein Analytics) is a reporting and data visualization tool built into Salesforce. It’s designed to help Salesforce users make sense of customer data by providing interactive dashboards and reports.

• Business Impact: CRMA helps business users track customer behavior, sales trends, and performance metrics within Salesforce. It’s easy to use for non-technical users and offers AI-powered insights to make decisions based on real-time data.

How Snowflake and Salesforce Work Together

Snowflake and Salesforce serve different roles but complement each other beautifully:

• Salesforce focuses on managing and analyzing customer data (such as sales leads and interactions).
• Snowflake is a powerful data warehouse that stores all your company’s data, including not just customer data but also financial, marketing, and operational data.

By integrating Snowflake and Salesforce, businesses can combine their customer relationship data with broader data sets from other parts of the company. This allows for more advanced analytics and deeper insights into business performance.

Reporting Tools for Business Users: Making Data Actionable

While Salesforce CRM Analytics is great for analyzing customer data directly within Salesforce, many businesses use additional reporting tools to create more advanced reports that combine Salesforce data with other business data stored in Snowflake. Here are the top reporting tools that integrate with both platforms and are user-friendly for non-technical business users.

1. Looker

Looker is a data platform that simplifies the process of creating interactive dashboards and reports. Acquired by Google, Looker is known for its ability to connect directly to data warehouses like Snowflake and cloud applications like Salesforce.

• Business Impact: Looker allows business users to create real-time, customized dashboards that pull in data from Snowflake and Salesforce. Its powerful data modeling capabilities enable deeper insights by combining data from different sources.
• Easy for Non-Technical Users: Looker’s interface is designed with business users in mind, offering pre-built dashboards and customizable reports that can be shared across teams. It simplifies the process of building detailed reports without requiring in-depth technical knowledge.
• Use Case: Sales managers can use Looker to combine Salesforce sales data with financial data from Snowflake to track the impact of sales efforts on revenue.

2. Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a self-service business intelligence tool that allows users to explore and visualize data in an intuitive way. It integrates easily with Snowflake and Salesforce, offering deep data analysis capabilities.

• Business Impact: Qlik Sense excels at helping users discover insights they might not have thought to look for. It provides a drag-and-drop interface to create visualizations, and its Associative Engine lets users explore relationships between data points more freely than traditional query-based tools.
• Great for Business Discovery: Qlik Sense encourages business users to explore data in a self-service manner, making it easy to drill into insights, ask “what-if” questions, and get instant answers without needing technical support.
• Use Case: Marketing teams can use Qlik Sense to combine customer interaction data from Salesforce with marketing campaign data stored in Snowflake to analyze the performance of campaigns and fine-tune targeting strategies.

3. Tableau

Tableau, now owned by Salesforce, is one of the most popular and powerful data visualization tools available. It connects to both Snowflake and Salesforce, allowing users to create interactive dashboards and reports.

• Business Impact: Tableau is ideal for creating highly visual reports that are easy to understand. Business users can drag and drop elements to build charts, graphs, and dashboards that can combine customer data from Salesforce with broader business data from Snowflake.
• Highly Visual and Interactive: Tableau is known for its rich visuals, making it an excellent choice for business users who want to tell a data-driven story or track performance in real-time using custom dashboards.
• Use Case: A CEO might use Tableau to pull data from Salesforce (sales pipeline) and Snowflake (financial performance) to get a complete picture of business health.

4. Power BI

Power BI is a Microsoft product known for its integration with a wide range of data sources, including Salesforce and Snowflake. It’s a robust tool that provides strong data modeling and reporting capabilities.

• Business Impact: Power BI is great for users who are already familiar with Microsoft products (like Excel). It offers seamless integration with the Microsoft ecosystem and provides easy access to advanced analytics and visualizations.
• Affordable and Scalable: Power BI is often chosen by businesses because it is cost-effective, easy to scale, and integrates well with other business tools.
• Use Case: A financial analyst could use Power BI to pull data from Snowflake (financial metrics) and Salesforce (customer payments) to forecast revenue and cash flow trends.

Key Benefits of Integrating Snowflake, Salesforce, and Reporting Tools

1. Unified Data View

By integrating Snowflake and Salesforce, business users can create a unified view of their entire operation. Instead of looking at just customer data in Salesforce, they can also pull in data from finance, marketing, and operations that live in Snowflake. This holistic view helps businesses understand the bigger picture.

2. Advanced Insights

With tools like Looker, Tableau, Qlik Sense, and Power BI, businesses can create highly customized dashboards and reports that go beyond basic metrics. These tools allow you to combine Salesforce CRM data with other data sources, enabling more complex analyses, like forecasting, trend analysis, or performance comparisons.

3. Self-Service Analytics

Each of these reporting tools is designed to empower non-technical users. You don’t need to know how to code or understand complex data queries. Whether you prefer Looker’s real-time data modeling, Qlik Sense’s intuitive data exploration, or Tableau’s visual storytelling, each platform makes it easy for business users to generate actionable insights from their data.

4. Scalability and Flexibility

Both Snowflake and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms, which means they can easily scale with your business. As your company grows and data needs increase, these platforms ensure that your data remains accessible and easy to analyze, without requiring significant infrastructure investments.

Conclusion: Making Data Work for Your Business

In summary, Snowflake and Salesforce are powerful platforms for storing and managing business and customer data. For business users, the real value comes from integrating these platforms with user-friendly reporting tools like Looker, Qlik Sense, Tableau, and Power BI, which make it easy to generate insights without requiring technical expertise.

By leveraging these tools, business users can access real-time reports, visualize trends, and make data-driven decisions that impact sales, marketing, finance, and overall business strategy. Whether you’re using Salesforce CRM Analytics for quick insights or diving deeper into data with Tableau or Looker, these tools empower you to turn data into a strategic asset.