Metrics provide critical insight into the performance of every organizational sales team. From your team’s number of outreaches to their average response time, gathering and interpreting sales team data can uncover important patterns that fuel future success. Passionate about driving sales performance with data-driven insights?
Don’t be so quick to rely on your current sales team software.
Just because sales representatives create reports in your current application doesn’t mean that they’re experiencing the full power of data-driven insights. In fact, your sales team may be suffering from limited data—which stunts their ability to make better decisions and improve growth.
Here’s what you need to know…
Doesn’t My Sales Application Provide Data-Driven Insights?
The short answer to this question is yes, but perhaps to a limited extent.
To be fair, if your organization uses a company-wide platform for sales team productivity and performance, your team members are likely monitoring KPIs, tracking data for accountability, and more. However, when it comes to leveraging data, not every application provides the deep insights your sales team needs.
“While business applications frequently enable users to visualize data captured by the application (e.g. sales figures in CRM system), they frequently lack the ability to combine this data on the fly with other data sources.”
The result? Your sales team makes important decisions on less-than-complete insights—which, in turn, hinders your company’s long-term success.
What’s more, you may even place your organization at a competitive disadvantage.
According to McKinsey&Company, when it comes to sales, organizations are already combining customer history data with social media—as well as “sales, customer, and HR data.”
If your organization lacks these capabilities, there’s the risk that other companies—with better data—will improve their profitability…while your organization sits on the sidelines.
How Can My Sales Team Gain Data-Driven Insights?
The good news is, there’s a way you can broaden the scope of your sales team’s insights. Your solution?
As SoftwareAdvice explains, “Data blending and mashups are a related benefit of embedded analytics.”
Embedded analytics allow your sales team to draw data-driven insights from your operational department, finance department, and more. But here’s the key…
Your sales team members can perform this analysis using their current sales software.
For instance, your sales department might…
- Run reports that compare client revenue with client technical support requests—revealing that some clients, despite their gross revenue, actually drain the resources of your IT department.
- Compare sales team activity by industry with data on shipping costs incurred by industry—providing your sales team with direction on which verticals offer your organization better long-term operational savings.
As you can see, there are versatile opportunities when it comes to data-driven insights through embedded analytics.
How Can My Sales Department Harness Data-Driven Insights?
At this point, you might be thinking…
It’s great that embedded analytics will better inform the activities of my sales team. But there’s a bit of a problem. My sales representatives aren’t IT whizzes.
Before you decide embedded analytics is simply too advanced for your sales team, here’s what you need to know.
Your sales team can enjoy a user-friendly interface for complex data analysis.
In fact, at Izenda, we’ve created a platform that can serve a wide range of end-users. Here are some examples of how we’ll make embedded analytics easy on your sales team…
- Drag-and-drop reports. Rest easy…there’s no need for your sales team to burden your developers or learn SQL to gain data-driven insights. At Izenda, we’ll help your sales representatives easily build reports with our drag-and-drop feature.
- Prebuilt dashboard library. Help your sales department quickly view data at a glance with Izenda’s dashboards. A sales team member can easily compile data—without IT help—using our library of ready-to-go dashboards.
- User-friendly (and beautiful) visualizations. Make data analysis visually appealing and easy to understand for your sales team. Izenda provides visualizations such as heat maps, geographic maps, scatter plots, bar charts, and more.
To see how Izenda can meet your needs, we’d encourage you to read how Izenda improved sales team performance for VanillaSoft.
Ready to take your organization to the next level with data-driven insights? It’s time to explore how Izenda can empower your sales team. Request a demo today, and experience our software firsthand.
