How can we use the join report in Salesforce to support business analysis?

The Join Report combines data from various objects and relationships within Salesforce, enabling us to gain a holistic view of our sales processes, opportunities, and customer interactions. By merging information from multiple sources, we can identify trends, patterns, and correlations that may otherwise go unnoticed, allowing us to leverage these insights for strategic decision-making.

Looks good? But when you start to use this function, you will find that it doesn’t support the joint function as SQL, and it only provides simple logic such as AND, and OR between two blocks. These limitations reduce the useability of the join report function in Salesforce. If you want to calculate the conversion rate from sales leads to opportunities, I will still suggest you use dashboard tools to build it. But today, I want to introduce how the join report can help a business. The perspective is the analysis of bundle sales.

Bundle sales: e.g. customers want software but need to run it on an instrument

For to-C businesses, identifying people who buy A products and B products through the machine learning association rule is relatively easy. But you don’t have abundant data set for to-B business to support your analysis and deduction.

Let’s say we have a nice software that can help customers solve some issues, and this software is running on a special instrument, but this instrument support not only one kind of software but many of them. As an analyst, you want to understand how much revenue is generated from software and instruments. The challenge is that you cannot simply calculate the revenue from the instrument and software together because the instrument sales may not be for this specific software we want to check.

If customer purchase orders combine these two SKUs, we can easily identify them. But what we are handling is opportunities in SFDC. The join report can help. I won’t explain how to build join reports. You can go to SFDC for more information. But the logic is you have two blocks. The first one contains the SKUs (software) you want to monitor, and the other block contains the SKU(instrument). And you can build the connection between two reports by grouping them up by opportunity number. So the join report shows opportunities for software, followed by the instrument. And this report is in sequence. Now we have the estimated revenue accumulated by opportunities, and you have the data to support good or bad for this bundle scheme.

You can add more SKUs in the filter to complete your bundle set.

Although we can use the join report to achieve our business goal of monitoring bundle sales, I still don’t think this salesforce function is really useful. SQL or DAX on Power BI is still recommended for manipulating data.