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How does a BI system support your sales department?
How does a BI system support your sales department? What reports and insights does it provide? Do you think it is increasing the efficiency and decision making capabilities of your organization?
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2 Answers
Hi Tim,
I work for a BI company, so I can provide some insight into how our customers are using it for sales analytics and what they get out of it.
First off, people often want to know how BI is going to help them above and beyond the standard reporting in their SFA system, like Salesforce.com. Standard operational reporting is often very limited - it only gives a snapshot of the current status, but doesn't give a historical or trending view. You can't compare across the tracked variables very easily, and you also can't bring in data from other sources (like quota info from the VP of Sales' spreadsheet or real revenues from the financial system).
So people look to BI to help them do the following:
*See how the pipeline is trending -you can see how the quarter is developing, how it compared to the same quarter last year, or the prior quarter.
*Get an accurate, historically based sales forecast
*Analyze the performance of sales professionals and benchmark them against their team as a whole, or other teams or regions
*See which products or which customers drive the largest profits
*See which regions or customer types drive the most revenues
We've done an analysis of how well our sales analytics customers do after deploying our solution. On average, they increase their deal sizes by22% and have a 28% increase in converting leads to opportunities.
So BI does have a measurable, positive impact on sales results.
- Barbara
Birst
www.birst.com
Using a BI system could support your sales department in many different ways. The best way to discover the ways in which you can infer information from your sales data is to have a go at analyzing it using a BI tool. This guide might help you out (and provides the dummy data set too, so no need to go searching for sample data!) - http://bimehq.com/documentation/getting_started/excel/index.html
Personally I think BI on top of sales data does a good job in increasing the efficiency and decision making capabilities of your organization, as it allows you to see things you would not have otherwise seen in your data, opening up unidentified opportunities and uncovering danger areas and threats.
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