The Sales Manager's Guide to Business Intelligence

BI Software Articles : The Sales Manager's Guide to Business Intelligence by R.L. Fielding

The Business Intelligence Edge As a Sales Manager, you rely on extensive data collection and analysis as a fundamental part of your practice. Business Intelligence software can help you can sail through these daily challenges with greater speed and confidence than ever before. The information provided by Business Intelligence software is vital in the development of products and the maximization of profits. On any given day, you may need instant access to sales and marketing data on the fly: sales by territory; profitability by client; or sales rep performance data. Your IT staff may already be stretched to the limit and unable to accommodate your growing needs for the info that fuels the Sales department's success.

That's why it's more critical than ever to have software configured for business intelligence needs that can tap into your corporate information resources without needing to involve the IT department every time. With business intelligence software in place, you can create the exact report you're looking for without the back and forth that occurs when you rely on others to pull the data together. The end-result is a set of totally customized and ad-hoc integrated reports that can more effectively reveal significant patterns or correlations in data and maybe even lead to that "Aha" moment that helps close a big deal.

The Growing Role of BI Software

As a sales manager, you are under pressure not only to plan and coordinate the activities of a sales team, but also to control product distribution, monitor budget performance, train and motivate personnel, and prepare forecasts. In the past, you may have manually sifted through mountains of data to produce relevant, actionable information. This process wastes time and talent that could be better spent elsewhere. A large part of your job is to direct the sales program and help the company-at-large choose intelligent courses of action. Delays in data processing directly threaten management's ability to adjust their activities quickly enough to achieve the maximum benefit. But with BI software, you can integrate important data on-the-fly to help you make better sales decisions. You can use the software to gather, store and analyze data, providing accurate, up-to-date information on demand. This can help you identify new sales opportunities, adjust sales pitches, plan sales campaigns or allocate resources without spending hours combing through different data sets. Business Intelligence software makes analyses easy by providing different views of company data, through methods such as filtering and recognizing patterns. Data from the current customer and prior customer databases, company orders database, lead database, online sales vs. offline sales records, sales pipeline records and other data files can be pulled into one comprehensive, easy-to-read report to answer your most pressing business questions.

You can access data and create ad-hoc reports yourself, according to your schedule, without having to look for IT support. The software enables users to view tables and fields from multiple databases--even disparate databases--right at a single workstation. You can pull data from various sources in the same "Request" for information, just as though they are all from the same database.

Some of the best Business Intelligence software for midsize enterprises helps you develop a "Request" that produces a "Result Set" of data. From that, you might produce and publish many different formats, including reports; Data Cubes, MS Excel spreadsheets, calendar, XML or raw data. Moreover, you should be able to post or email the results anywhere, or export them as PDF, RTF, TIFF, HTML, TXT, DBF, XLS or CVS files.

Sales Managers Profit from BI

Business Intelligence software provides the rapid feedback that sales managers need to assess their strategy and shorten the time to close. These tools can reveal critical information on how your products are being received and help you to better understand your customers.

With BI software, you can track revenue streams and the response to marketing, and identify the activities that yield the most profit. Imagine being able to predict how much money each of your customers was going to spend or which products each was going to purchase over the next few months. Business Intelligence software can analyze sales statistics gathered by your staff to determine sales potential and inventory requirements, and to monitor customers' preferences, making this dream a reality and your job a little easier. By tracking and analyzing the efforts of your sales team, you can assign sales territories, set goals and establish training programs more effectively, while advising the sales representatives on ways to improve their sales performance. Well-informed management decisions that allow strong performance to be properly rewarded are what separate the top managers from the rest of the pack. Implementing business intelligence software can help differentiate you from the rest. By integrating more advanced Business Intelligence practices into your corporate decision-making, you can better control the sales pipeline from initial opportunity and lead to final close, thus allowing you to grow revenues quickly, predictably, and profitably by focusing on the right deals at the right time. Business Intelligence software can empower your team with the extra competitive edge to drive sales figures to new heights.

This article is copyrighted by Decision Technology. It may not be reproduced in whole or in part and may not be posted on other websites, without the express written permission of the author who may be contacted via email at DTI@digitalbrandexpressions.com.

About Decision Technology, Inc. Decision Technology business intelligence software is the ideal solution for organizations with limited IT resources, and whose data are confined in disparate databases or operational systems. Since 1985, Decision Technology has provided organizations with intuitive, information retrieval software for decision support applications. Its newest business intelligence software product, DecisionCentric, provides Enterprise Information Integration with query and reporting tools optimized for small and medium size organizations. It enables users to integrate, publish and analyze enterprise data across disparate databases--without expensive ETL technology.

About the Author
R.L. Fielding has been a freelance writer for 10 years, offering her expertise and skills to a variety of major organizations in the education, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing industries. She lives in New Jersey with her dog and two cats and enjoys rock climbing and ornamental gardening.

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