How Business Intelligence Helps Sales & Marketing

Sales and marketing teams have a tough job cut out for themselves, especially considering the cut-throat market of today. In such an environment, modern tools have become critical for survival and success. Seems simple enough, right? It would be but the problem is that the world is brimming with technologies and tools that promise the potential to transform sales and marketing for good. Yet, there is one tool that has remained among the most sought after among them all: business intelligence (BI) which helps businesses get the best possible value out of their sales and marketing efforts.

BI is a broad term that refers to the processes, tools & technologies used by organizations to extract, analyze and present business information. And, BI tools help make sense of large volumes of data to identify trends or patterns. These insights are then communicated through dashboards and reports for the business stakeholders to act upon quickly.

The common BI technologies include data warehouses, data marts, and ETL (extract-transform-load) tools. They are used for moving data from various sources into one central location for analysis, OLAP (online analytical processing) cubes for performing sophisticated calculations on large datasets, and reporting tools. BI can be used across departments and teams while offering companies a competitive advantage over their competition & enabling them to make better decisions faster.

How? Listed below are some key benefits to show you precisely that:

• Identify goals on the basis of data: One of the key reasons why business intelligence tools have become so popular among sales and marketing teams is because such tools use data to fortify decision-making. Not only that, business intelligence tools also strengthen marketing functions, enhancing visibility of sales data, etc. to help refine marketing campaigns and position them for better success.
• Streamlined workflow: Yet another benefit of a robust business intelligence tool is its ability to streamline the company’s workflows. You see, such tools typically have access to a variety of data that can be used to automate insight planning, reporting, analysis, etc. This, in turn, empowers organizations to quickly respond to the market’s evolving needs and stay ahead of their competitors. Furthermore, automation of repetitive tasks allows the team to focus on insights and what it enables, thus leading to better productivity and workflows.
• Enhanced predictions: Sales teams must contend with a lot of future-based factors, such as inventory costs, order rates, etc. So, what can business intelligence do in this regard? Well, quite simply business intelligence brings in speed and accuracy in sales-related predictions via analysis of data about demand, campaigns, etc. Case in point: an analysis of historical sales data can be used to predict with enhanced accuracy, thus allowing the company to stock up inventory in time, and better predict future revenue among other things.
• Better customer experiences: Business intelligence offers customer insights that can be quickly leveraged to organize customers into relevant groups and also bring in more prospects based on the business’s identified target audience. You see, customer experience is critical and business intelligence tools help in this regard by empowering marketers to better understand their target customer. Furthermore, such tools can also help improve processes, automate tasks, improve productivity, etc — all of which improve not only sales but also customer experiences.

There you have it folks, some of the various ways in which business intelligence works to assist any given organization’s sales and marketing teams. Business intelligence tools empower these teams with not only extensive insights into customers’ behavior and preferences but also helps them define strategic goals for the business, find new opportunities to earn better revenues, and also enhance their sales and marketing campaigns in accordance to the behavior and expectations of their unique target audiences. If you too want to put business intelligence to work for your company, then your next ought to be looking for a development company who can help you build and integrate the right tool.