Bottom line, if you’re in sales, and you miss forecasts, you lose your credibility. Period. In the past, you may have relied on your experience and intuition alone to set forecasts. This is because hard data was scant, and what was available was not current enough to be useful. Microsoft Power BI provides the hard data you need to support your gut instincts.
Read on to learn how Power BI will enable you to access the real information you need to backup your forecasts, predictions and analysis.
Find Real Causes To Sales Challenges
Without business intelligence software like Power BI that provide spreadsheet data at a glance, it’s much harder to determine what the real reasons are for sales challenges and bottlenecks. For example, let’s say one of four sales regions is lagging behind in the current sales period. You have to get on the phone and talk to the sales manager for the region, taking hours away from your already loaded day.
Create Solutions Before End of Sales Period
Perhaps the performance of a single sales representative is dragging down the rest of the team, affecting the whole region. With Power BI, you can access your dashboard, drill down into the troubled region and review the data for each sales rep. You don’t have to wait until a sales period is over to find this critical data – it’s available in real-time.
Get the Data You Need in the Office or on the Road
Despite all the advances in technology, sales is still, in some respects, a face-to-face game. Customer relationships are built with in-person sales calls and socializing. Microsoft Power BI makes you more effective when traveling because you access the data you need anytime, anywhere on your mobile or portable devices. All you need is an internet connection, and it’s like you are sitting in front of your dashboard essentials back in the office.
Your sales force will be able to stay on top of fast-moving markets and account activity from your cab, hotel room or office waiting area. If Wi-Fi is available, you can even pull up customer data right in the sales call itself. Your sales calls becomemore relevant, focused and productive.
Lead Generation Pipeline
One of the most common refrains from sales staff? “We need better leads.” With Power BI, you can see the whole marketing funnel. You know where the leads are coming from and when. So rather than relying upon educated guesswork based on confidence alone, you have hard data to track lead flow and conversion.
Connectors to Popular CRMs and Marketing Automation Packages
You have deep knowledge about lead generation because Power BI has connectors available to most popular sales software. For example, you can:
- Hook into your Salesforce or Dynamics CRM data to gain customer insight.
- Connect your Marketo or other marketing automation platform to view marketing funnels to track lead flow.
- Tap into your Hubspot data to see what content marketing is providing the best click-throughs to your demos and white papers.
Sales Forecasting Is the Heart of Your Business Success
Power BI helps you get sales forecasting down to a fine science. Here’s why that is important: Accurate sales forecasting and analysis drives your entire business. If forecasting is off, manufacturing and fulfillment is thrown off as well. For professional service companies, forecasting affects staffing and equipment decisions.
Accurate forecasting affects everything downstream in your business. Power BI gives you hard data to help guide you to greater customer acquisition, sales and profitability.
Ready to join disparate data, visualize it, and glean transformational insight? Click here and we’ll visualize your data for free.
