5-Minute Guide
to Sales Analytics
Brilliant and determined as sales organizations are these days, new
pressures often undermine their magic. It comes from all sides — the
need for more efficiency and to do more with less, the rising complexity
of sales, the new awareness of each lead’s cost, and the competition that
seems to strike new opportunities a few crucial seconds faster.
Some look to sales automation tools as the answer, only to realize later
that they are only the beginning. Executives need to know why, who, and
what-if, and a dozen other questions — quickly overwhelming pre-built
reports, limited data, and cramped exploration. Until these and so many
other questions find answers, leads go to waste, opportunities remain
hidden, pipeline analysis fails to prevent nasty surprises, and sales force
performance falls short.
Sales success depends more than ever now on an analytics platform that
supports sales organizations completely — with three critical functions.
Data access and analysis.
Opportunities fade too quickly and questions arise too fast for any tool without
the speed, flexibility, and universal adaptability of an analytics platform. Successful
sales management starts with access to data from multiple, disparate sources, from
inside and outside the organization. The data comes from a sales automation tool
like Salesforce.com, or enterprise applications such as SAP ERP, Oracle E-Business
Suite, or other source. Executives and managers interrogate data in dimensionfree data exploration, going to any level of detail as they create complex queries,
model dimensions, and new navigational paths. Rich visualizations make the
meaning quickly apparent. And it’s all done without IT help.
An enterprise class platform goes deep and broad, too. It scales up and out, letting
a broad range of users view and analyze data in role-based views. In contextual
collaboration, they speed and deepen their knowledge as they socialize moments
of insight, ideas, and hypotheses for more informed and transparent decisions.
Monitor and adjust the pipeline as needed
Sales managers dread period-end pipeline surprises. On a sales analytics platform,
they keep a close watch. Data mashups let them combine all relevant data from
disparate sources, without IT help, to ensure the pipeline has enough deals of the
right kind moving through it.
Visualized data lets them grasp meaning quickly and intuitively in a cascade of
questions about every aspect. They gain ever greater visibility into the unknown,
and the potential for surprises falls away.
Enterprise-class technology lets the entire sales team share in the confidence, or
alert. The entire organization stays aligned with overall sales strategy — boosting
confidence and productivity.
Manage performance and goals
Ultimately, sales comes down to performance. On a sales analytics platform,
managers analyze performance at every stage of the customer life cycle, from
lead generation to deal close, with predictive and event-driven analytics to reveal
hidden relationships, patterns, and emerging trends.
When one area needs help or new opportunities arise, even more questions than
usual arise, and fast. Who do we redeploy? Who’s performing best right now?
5-Minute Guide to Sales Analytics
2
What marketing initiatives are working? The answers come in dimension-free data
exploration and visualized data that analysts grasp quickly. Even deeper insights
arise as executives test scenarios and predict the impact. One question leads to
the next and the next — pushing the entire organization to becoming the fastest to
actionable insight.
Conclusion.
Every sales organization and every salesperson does its best magic on a solid
base. It all comes down to confidence — confidence in a taut machine that runs
on a modern sales analytics platform. It’s the confidence people have when they’re
supported, encouraged, monitored, and recognized across the enterprise.
The insights springing from an analytics platform start with full use of all relevant
data in dimension-free data exploration. Analysts interrogate data at whatever
angle that meaning may hide.
Data mashups let analysts and authors combine data from disparate sources
quickly, on the spot, without waiting for IT.
Then, as smart as analysts may be, predictive and event-driven analysis blends in
for a powerful boost to anticipate and spot opportunities and risks.
Enterprise-class technology spreads the data, the analysis, and the insight as far as
it needs to go with security and role-based access. The platform scales up and out
to meet the most demanding needs, from integration to extensibility, security and
manageability.
The analytics platform gives the entire sales organization the platform they need
to make magic happen. In fact, it only seems like magic. It’s really just insight and
execution a few seconds faster than the competition.
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TIBCO Software Inc.
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