s3e18 Innovating Through Business Intelligence Solutions with Ziv Barzilay

Episode Summary

Welcome to Limitless B.I., a show that interviews real world, innovative business leaders who strive to see beyond the data to produce tangible results in their organizations using business intelligence. Today Ziv Barzilay, Director, Products & Engineering at Salesforce, joins the show to expound on the remarkable innovations he’s been working on at Salesforce. Ziv focuses specifically on the Squirrel business application he’s been able to integrate into the organization and the astounding results he’s already achieved less than one year after launch. Ziv discusses engaging salespeople and increasing user adoption, design strategies and what he believes the future holds for similar business intelligence solutions at Salesforce.

Key Takeaways

01:03 – Ziv Barzilay joins the show to talk about his background and the exciting project he’s working on at Salesforce

05:38 – Tips for engaging salespeople and increasing user adoption

09:27 – Ziv speaks to the type of designs they’ve utilized to simplify their offerings

11:37 – Donald and Ziv speak to the value of the tool Squirrel

15:51 – How Ziv’s colleagues at Salesforce view Squirrel

18:42 – Creating new business cases and identifying value drivers

20:18 – Where Ziv sees the future of business applications such as Squirrel

21:37 – Donald and Paul take a moment to praise the remarkable innovations Ziv and his team have been able to achieve at Salesforce

Tweetable Quotes

“It wasn’t easy in the beginning. We went through different design approaches and finally we were able to balance between ‘How do we capture, as much as possible, use cases and still provide a more intuitive UI that Account Executives can actually use themselves. And we were actually very successful because we have about 3,000 AEs using the tool right now and we were able to touch over a quarter of a billion dollars of annual contract value.” (04:31) (Ziv)

“Squirrel is very powerful in terms of almost every property in every component can be connected to a formula. So, the user interface is now fully dynamic based on user conditions. So, we were able to do almost everything we wanted to do with the UI. And, another advantage is that, when we worked with our stakeholders and we got a lot of feedback, we were able to quickly implement new ideas and requirements because of the ease of use. Squirrel is very easy to implement or change things and deploy that to production. It was very simple.” (12:38) (Ziv)

“It doesn’t look like B.I. or a dashboard. People look at it as a full-blown application end-to-end.” (16:23) (Ziv)

“Each business case produces hundreds of data points which we can’t get elsewhere from any third-party company. And now we generate our own benchmark, which we can use for product management, product marketing, roadmap, and other areas in the company.” (19:59) (Ziv)

Resources Mentioned

Limitless BI Website – https://limitlessbi.com/

Donald’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldmaccormick/?originalSubdomain=uk

Ziv’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/zbarzil/?originalSubdomain=il

Squirrel365 Website – https://squirrel365.io/