General Discussions

Hey everyone,

As someone in a sales role a lot of the time I don't get to speak with folks who use the platform every day, so I'm interested to learn a few things about your experience with Vena.

• What was the hardest thing to learn about Vena?
  
  
• If you've used it for a while, what's your favorite thing about the platform? Your least favorite?
  
  
• If you were me, and your job was to reach out to folks who don't know what Vena is, what's the first thing you'd tell them about it and why?

I'm excited to hear from you all!

• I found the data side hardest to learn (calcs and VenaQL). This isn't something I had come across in my career before so there was a steep learning curve BUT once you figure it out it makes Vena so much more powerful.
• I absolutely love data transformations. We combine data from multiple different sources, some that are calendar year, others that are fiscal. It took some time to figure out the transformations we needed, but everything runs so seamlessly now. 
• I would push our native integrations. This is such a powerful feature of Vena and makes it not just a finance tool, but a tool that can be leveraged across all departments. We only started truly leveraging the Salesforce integration recently and it is making such a difference already.

Hey everyone,

As someone in a sales role a lot of the time I don't get to speak with folks who use the platform every day, so I'm interested to learn a few things about your experience with Vena.

• What was the hardest thing to learn about Vena?
  
  
• If you've used it for a while, what's your favorite thing about the platform? Your least favorite?
  
  
• If you were me, and your job was to reach out to folks who don't know what Vena is, what's the first thing you'd tell them about it and why?

I'm excited to hear from you all!

I don't think it counts as cheating at all, any insights here are valuable!

I'm curious though, when you're saying the data side was a steep learning curve how long would you say it took until you felt comfortable with it?

I'm also curious about the native integrations piece. I could foresee the Salesforce integrations being used for things like sales forecasting, and incentive compensation management, but I wonder if there might be other more niche use cases here I'm not thinking about. Are there any that you've run across, or thought about, that made you say "wow I never thought about that!"?

• I found the data side hardest to learn (calcs and VenaQL). This isn't something I had come across in my career before so there was a steep learning curve BUT once you figure it out it makes Vena so much more powerful.
• I absolutely love data transformations. We combine data from multiple different sources, some that are calendar year, others that are fiscal. It took some time to figure out the transformations we needed, but everything runs so seamlessly now. 
• I would push our native integrations. This is such a powerful feature of Vena and makes it not just a finance tool, but a tool that can be leveraged across all departments. We only started truly leveraging the Salesforce integration recently and it is making such a difference already.

Hey everyone,

As someone in a sales role a lot of the time I don't get to speak with folks who use the platform every day, so I'm interested to learn a few things about your experience with Vena.

• What was the hardest thing to learn about Vena?
  
  
• If you've used it for a while, what's your favorite thing about the platform? Your least favorite?
  
  
• If you were me, and your job was to reach out to folks who don't know what Vena is, what's the first thing you'd tell them about it and why?

I'm excited to hear from you all!

For the data, I think I was spoiled being internal. I relied so much on our data team. I think that's the biggest thing about Vena, you learn so much more when you do something wrong rather than when you have instructions/an expert to follow. I would say it took me writing 3 independent calc scripts and probably only 1 complex-ish VenaQL to say it finally clicked. Now I am looking for excuses to write VenaQL so I can keep honing the skill (which is super transferrable to SOQL and SQL so a good feather to have in your career cap!).

We actually use our salesforce data for Accounts Receivable too! So not only do we import a list of our customers and their contract amounts, but we feed in the last time they were contacted, risk status, their CSM/Salesperson, etc and match this against our ERP data so we have a full picture when doing our forecasting and before we reach out. Quicker, centralised, and a more efficient use of licences!

I don't think it counts as cheating at all, any insights here are valuable!

I'm curious though, when you're saying the data side was a steep learning curve how long would you say it took until you felt comfortable with it?

I'm also curious about the native integrations piece. I could foresee the Salesforce integrations being used for things like sales forecasting, and incentive compensation management, but I wonder if there might be other more niche use cases here I'm not thinking about. Are there any that you've run across, or thought about, that made you say "wow I never thought about that!"?

• I found the data side hardest to learn (calcs and VenaQL). This isn't something I had come across in my career before so there was a steep learning curve BUT once you figure it out it makes Vena so much more powerful.
• I absolutely love data transformations. We combine data from multiple different sources, some that are calendar year, others that are fiscal. It took some time to figure out the transformations we needed, but everything runs so seamlessly now. 
• I would push our native integrations. This is such a powerful feature of Vena and makes it not just a finance tool, but a tool that can be leveraged across all departments. We only started truly leveraging the Salesforce integration recently and it is making such a difference already.

Hey everyone,

As someone in a sales role a lot of the time I don't get to speak with folks who use the platform every day, so I'm interested to learn a few things about your experience with Vena.

• What was the hardest thing to learn about Vena?
  
  
• If you've used it for a while, what's your favorite thing about the platform? Your least favorite?
  
  
• If you were me, and your job was to reach out to folks who don't know what Vena is, what's the first thing you'd tell them about it and why?

I'm excited to hear from you all!