How can the sales team benefit from having a Business Intelligence system in place?

You really are asking three distinct questions so let me take them one at a time.

“How can the sales team benefit from having a Business Intelligence system in place?”

- Reduce their workload: Find out what information they typically need the most and spend the most time searching for, and make it available at their fingertips via dashboards, hotlinks or push emails.
- Improve the customer interaction and experience: give them information about the customer’s buying cycle, product preferences/propensity and awareness of the customer’s satisfaction level so they can act to reinforce or salvage the relationship proactively.
- Guide more tactical actions: give information in the context of their daily/weekly tasks workflow so that they can act on it. For example, sequence their customer calls based on calling out high risk customers to touch now.
- Deliver incremental sales: anything you ask sales to do with BI has to result in incremental activity like more sales, more quotes, higher product bundling and overcoming price barriers.
- Provide high level trends and “big picture”: BI can be especially useful at this, because it is pooling larger universe of information and detect opportunities. Show where certain products are selling higher than average, or show customers what products others like them are buying.

“Have been working with many BI companies in my career to help cultivate successful marketing programs but recently I've been thinking how can my sales team get more out of BI tool? “

Marketers think and sales people act. Not stereotyping – I hope you agree this reflects the general reality. Do not simply transfer the same reports over to Sales that Marketing uses. Less is more, simpler is better. Help sales visualize their customers in a new way, with different information than they work with. Personalize by allowing sales team to self-select out of reports they deem not useful. Consider this as feedback for you to improve what you provide.

“What applications would serve us best?”

As you can see from the above, it is not so much the toolset that matters but realizing the benefits, processes and the culture you put in place. That said, here are some traits you should have on your checklist:

- How easy is it to access? Can they get to the information in multiple ways whether at the office or on the road?
- Is it integrated with other tools like SFA? Keeping it consolidated in a few existing applications.
- Can it provide the benefits you are seeking above? For example, how can BI information be delivered to help them with their customer interaction.
- Will your analytics team (or a vendor) bring predictive intelligence information seamlessly into the BI environment? What about data from third party sources?

Having good looking dashboards is a start, but if in the end you do not define and deliver the benefits you seek to achieve it is going to be an uphill task to achieve widespread adoption and success that BI can bring to the table.

These are the kind of questions I love! You are drawing the important connection between using business intelligence and actually DOING business. LOVE IT!

I think a BI team would benefit sales in a number of ways, but it would need to evolve a bit from the typical thought process with which business intelligence is approached currently.

The current incarnation of business intelligence (at least the majority of it) is to draw as much data from the enterprise as possible into a single location from which reporting and analytics is performed. While an admirable endeavor, not as useful to sales since the data is limited to existing customers at best.

I would envision the best fit for sales would be a combination of classic BI as described above and a group that monitors industry trends as well as social media information from potential customer demographics. The BI team would be best matched with marketing to gather this information since you would gather higher quality data by interacting with customers than just evaluating them in silence.

One of the evolutionary leaps that BI needs to make is to be able to farm the extremely raw customer data that exists across the internet as it pertains to a companies sales initiatives. How much easier would it be for a salesperson if they had a profile on prospective clients that consisted not only of classic enterprise data that usually deals with competitors, but to have full profiles that included the types of things those customers have mentioned they'd like to see, their current purchasing trends, what interests them, and so on.

True, this type of BI would be a much more dynamic type of team than just the typical "let's report on the data we have" mentality. However, for a sales team, this is the type of invaluable BI that would make the effort worth while.

Again, LOVE the question.

Sales is a primary beneficiary of BI because of the simplicity of tying input to output for that role (X units of Product A sold by Salesperson Jane during Campaign Z). Obviously, a simplistic view but when you break it down, that's at least one effective way of describing sales in most companies. Those simple metrics can not only be informative to sales managers and executives but to team members as a great motivational component of their daily work.

Beyond that, trends and analysis of why certain products sell (or not) can be fed back into marketing and the producers of the product. For instance, if you sell software and a given product isn't moving well, you can do deep dives on the reasons (high numbers of trouble calls because of bugs, doesn't fit a person's needs, etc) and iterate to a better product.

There are an obscene number of BI tools out there and I've used many of them in previous roles, from home-grown dashboards created by Hyperion, Crystal Reports, to the off-the-shelf products at Salesforce.com or the very many in between. What you use depends on the level of customization you seek, and if the level is high, the maturity of the internal BI and associated ETL teams within your company. Obviously, that is a call your company would need to make.

This is a great thread, very useful.

Have a look at my article in Business Performance Management (BPM) magazine on how Business Intelligence (and BPM) can impact the sales process across teams (sales, marketing, finance, operations) - and how BI impacts the sales decision cycle:

http://businessfoundation.typepad.com/bf_blog/2010/10/making-your-number.html

Parth,
I completely agree. I happen also to agree with David, that's a wonderful kind of question, and I agree even more when he speaks about the need to evolve from "what we have" up to some kind of predictive behavioural analysis that would impact tremendously on business (I'm thinking for instance about banking). Great posts, guys, thank you.

Since it is the 50th anniversary of Business Intelligence, I also completely agree that it is time to move from data collection - system which can tell us what happened more towards data prediction. That should be something that every team, including Sales team, will benefit from. If you have a system that will tell you from the data it has that this summer you can expect great increase in sales od some SKU in some region, that will be very vauable information.
Or, if you have personalized dashboard (like, for example http://bit.ly/hhUCp5 ) that will inform you every day what you can expect until the end of the year if you keep up in current pace, then you simply can't be surprised with realization at the end of the year. Moreover, such a dashboard will alert you appropriatelly and on time that you are not in the margins of the budget, etc.

This question deserves multiple replies depending upon what is sold, imho. Being generic, it is hard to say something more of what has been said.

I'd just add that conventional metrics from in-house data can help you learn what can be upsold to your customers, to harvest the max out of them.

One component of BI for the sales team that I find is often missed is providing salespeople direct access to customer service information. A lot of organizations will have a CRM system in use by the sales team but a separate Service Desk for support and trouble tickets. Rarely do you see integration (or even sales team access to the Service Desk).

I think it's critical for a salesperson to know all that they can know regarding their client before they call into an account, so assuming they are about to communicate with an existing customer, they should know the history of recent tickets and be knowledgeable on the status of those tickets.

In addition to the great answers above, I suggest my sales team to have a dashboard per active customer they are assigned with information on customer service stats for that customer, with rss feeds to news pertaining to the customer and the customer's industry. This will make for much more informed conversations and help to build a stronger relationship by being knowledgeable regarding the customer's business.

Traditional BI tools won't make this easy, you need to seek products that enable the sales team and salespeople to quickly build their own dashboards and reports on the fly. There are a number of BI 2.0 solutions with mashboard features that can do this.

The deep insight that business intelligence can provide would be enough benefit for the sales team to consider using a BI solution. Only then are they able to really understand where to focus their efforts in oder to get a maximum ROI. Take a look at these sales dashboards for an example of how BI can be used in the sales department: http://bimeanalytics.com/showcase/ (click "sales")