Managing March Madness with Sales Analytics

March 19, 2008

I received an email from Claudia Kulaga today, an independent consultant, on the topic of sales analytics. It’s quite topical as Q1 winds down and the NCAA basketball tournament gets ready to roll. Here’s what she writes:

Sales can be a mad, mad, mad game. Just like in basketball, you may have the best team, your star players may be at the top of their game, and you may be in the running for coach of the year. But when the last buzzer rings, are you celebrating a score that meets or exceeds what you had been predicting at half-time, or do you have your star player still airborn in one last desperate attempt at victory before the clock runs out?

Sometimes that last attempt works and wins you the game, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s fine for basketball, but it’s definitely no way to run your sales organization. You don’t get any more points for the acrobatics and maneuvers you’re stuck performing to try and make your numbers when your pipeline isn’t shaping up the way you thought it would at the end of the quarter, and you certainly don’t get additional revenue. All you’re likely to get is a back-ache, and just maybe you’ll make your number.

Profitability comes from predictability, and in this mad world of business you need as much predictability and visibility as you can get, especially when monitoring your sales pipeline - the source of your revenue. And, unless you’ve got a multi-million dollar IT budget and existing IT infrastructure to match, you’re probably not getting all the information you need about your pipeline from your CRM data and Excel spreadsheets. A big part of the reason for that is that while CRM systems are useful, they are designed to process transactional data, not for analysis and dynamic reporting.

That’s why the market shift to business analytics as a service (BAaaS) is getting so much attention right now. With just a few clicks, an on-demand sales analytics applications will allow you to see not just how many deals you have lined up, but critical information that defines the meaning those numbers have for your pipeline, your predictions, and your profits. You’ll have immediate access to information such as what stage of the sales cycle each of your deals is in and how likely they are to close based on variables such as individual sale’s rep’s abilitities, product or industry verticals, competitors, or regions. You’ll be able to splice that with information from other data sources such as Excel sheets and your financial solution, and view the results in a simple and easy to understand format. You’ll have easy access to simple to understand, actionable information at your fingertips, so you always know where you are in your pipeline, where you’ve been, and where you need to go to win.

With one of the emerging business analytics as a service applications, right from the start and through the end of the quarter, you’ll always know exactly where you are in the game and just what are the stengths and weaknesses in your sales pipeline. So when the last buzzer rings at the end of the quarter you won’t be stuck performing acrobatics to try and meet forecasts that were based on incomplete or innacurate information. You’ll be breaking open a bottle, not your back.
The world is mad (enough). With business analytics as a service you don’t have to be!

Got an interesting angle on sale analytics and the business intelligence market shift to SaaS? Send it to me and I’ll post it here.

Written by dcunningham · Filed Under Features