Streams are the core of Variance. Anything you follow in the system will flow into one of your Streams. To follow an Account or Contact you simple click Follow (clicking Unfollow, unsurprisingly, does the opposite):
You can see above that it's also possible to follow to your additional streams by just clicking the dropdown arrow. You can even create a new stream right from that interface.
Each Stream has a name, a type, and can be hooked up to a Slack channel if you also want to be alerted as you work off the actions your prospects and customers are taking. the Slack integrations page has a more detailed walkthrough showing just how easy that is to get set up.
When you click into any stream you will see a few tabs at the top. There are three really important ones to how the stream works:
Creating new Streams in Variance is easy. You simply click the +Add Stream button on the top right of your Streams page or you create it from any Account, Contact, or Event Type Follow dropdown. (You can also Duplicate existing Team Streams if that's an easier way to get started.)
But the hard part is knowing what kind of Streams to make. This very much depends on who you are.
If you're a Growth Seller, the easiest way to think about splitting out your Streams is either by stage or territory. For instance, you might have different Streams for customers who are in different Stages and move them around:
Or you could do it by territory. Either geographically (California, Nevada, Texas) or industry (Technology, Power, Retail). It's easy and totally up to you.
If you're a Growth Operator you're probably interested in setting up a number of Streams that push data into Slack for the whole team to see. We suggest thinking about this by grouping categories of events. For instance, you might have Streams in Variance (and Slack) for:
These are just a few ideas and obviously will depend greatly on what kind of product you offer.
You may seem some Streams in your nav marked Team Streams, these are streams that have been built by an Admin and shared with everyone in the org. As a rule, these Streams are useful for everyone to look at and can also act as a good jumping off point for you to Duplicate a Stream.
We allow you to duplicate any Stream you have access to (it could be yours, a teammates, or a Team Stream). To do that, just:
All the follows will copy over, but you will need to add a new Slack channel if you want it to flow there.
You can either connect a Stream to a Slack channel when you first create it or at any time by clicking the Send Events to Slack button.
That will bring up the Stream settings, where you can search for any Slack channel (it has to exist already).
Like Views, Streams can have an icon to make them easy to spot in your sidebar. You can either add an icon to a Stream while you're setting it up, or afterward by clicking the Stream icon at the top of the page. You'll see this interface pop up where you can choose a color + icon combination.
When you set up a Stream you'll be given a choice to include digests. Digests are simply rollups of activity over specific time windows. You can choose between hourly, twice a day, or daily Digests. You also have the choice to send only Digests to Slack instead of all events.
If you choose to include Digests, they will show up in your Stream like a regular event, except they include different information than you would typically see.
The Digest event includes four bits of information:
To dive deeper you simply click into the event where you can see all the detail around who those accounts and contacts are, what actions they took, and the volume. In addition we display the top Account, Contact, and Event Type in the overview.