Your First Ten Minutes (Users)

First off, welcome to Variance! There are lots of good Docs around here to help you get situated, but I'd especially suggest reading What is Variance? to understand what's happening.

Milestones

Now that you have been invited by your admin, you can hopefully see some of the milestones that they have set up. 

What is a milestone?

Milestones are a way to track the activity of a Contact or Account. A milestone—like onboarded or product qualified lead (PQL)—will generally include some behavioral criteria such as users invited or actions taken, a threshold, and can also be windowed to a specific amount of time (in the last 30 days). Milestones are the best way to track the growth of your prospects and customers in a PLG world.

Technically, milestones are made up of four components:

• Event Type: these are the actions a user takes
• Property filters (optional): do you only want to count the Invited User action if the invited user was an admin versus a member? You would handle that with a property filter.
• Threshold: how many times does this action need to be taken in order to be counted against the milestone?
• Time Window (optional): do you only want to track whether this action happened a specific number of times within a certain time period? (Coming soon to Variance)

MIlestones sit at the core of the product and allow you to cut your accounts in any way you would like. To read more about Milestones and even how to build milestones, go here. 

Streams & Slack Channels

When you get started you'll have one Stream called YOUR NAME's Stream (only replace YOUR NAME with your actual name). You may also see some Team Streams that were shared by an Admin in your org. By default when you hit Follow on any Account or Contact it will get routed to that Stream. The best thing to fill that stream with are your most important Accounts, so why don't you search for those and start following them?

You can also create additional Streams by either navigating to your Streams page and clicking +Add Stream or by hitting the little dropdown on any Account or Contact and clicking Add to new stream.

Once you've followed some Accounts, you should start to see events flowing into your Stream. Don't be alarmed if you don't see any yet, we won't get notified until users from those accounts take actions in your system. Either way, now is a good time to connect Slack to your Stream. One of the things that makes Variance unique is we make it easy to get your data wherever you work. To add a Slack channel the channel just needs to exist in Slack (you can go make a new one now). Then you just click on the Stream options button in the top right, click Edit stream, and find the Slack channel (we'll autocomplete for you) and click Save.

Views & Favorites

You might have team views already set up by your admin but you can also create individual views for yourself based on what you might want to track.

Creating a View

Creating a view is easy.

1. Click on Accounts or Contacts (depending on the type of view you want to build)
2. Click the Views tab
3. Click Create View
4. Name your View and build your filters (or use an existing Smart Tag)

That's it. Now you have your view, it's in your sidebar, and if you want to make it even easier to access, just favorite it.

The interface for building views is the same as the one for building Smart Tags. The only difference is that you can actually use your existing Smart Tags in your views.

You can also favorite a view by clicking the favorite icon that sits next to name of any of your views. 

Favorites will reside at the top of your left column, above your Accounts. 

That's it. Now you're good to go. If you have questions reach out on our shared Slack Connect channel or through our support.