To succeed in your job, you make decisions every day based on your grasp and outlook for your business. Here are some typical examples:
· You are in charge of sales; a competitor is doing well and your management wants you to deal with the problem.
· You are in charge of finance; the marketing department wants to spend money and you are asked to approve the request, based on your outlook for the company’s cash flow in the coming weeks.
· You are a regional sales manager who needs to reassign sales territories between the reps. Before you do, you want to know what the impact of the change will be on revenue, commissions, and travel expenses based on past performance.
In today’s difficult economic climate, if something goes wrong, saying “I didn’t know” is not a good excuse. To maximize your success you need good visibility into your business.
There Must be a Better Way
How many times have you found yourself faced with a decision and looking desperately for data that will help you make your choice easier?
If you are the sales director who was called to deal with a new competitor, you will want to look at your team’s win/loss record against that competitor. You will also want to know what discounts your sales team offered in those deals. And you will want to look at public data on the competitor’s financial performance to see how they are doing relative to your company and to your industry.
You can access your CRM system and get a list of sales prospects where the competitor was involved, along with the status (win/loss) of the deal, the sales region, and the date.
This information is helpful, but not enough. Missing, for competitive wins, are the amount that was actually booked and the discount that was given. To get this information, you go to your accounting system. But your accounting system doesn’t record competitive data, so you can’t simply generate a report that only lists wins against the competitor. What you end up doing is generating a list of all recent deals from your accounting system. You then look at the deals one at a time and try to match the deals in the report from your CRM system with those that appear in the report from the accounting system. Adding to your challenge is the fact that company names that appear in your CRM system don’t always match those in the accounting system. One system might list deals with “Coca Cola” and “IBM,” while the other system lists deals with “The Coca Cola Company” and “International Business Machines.”
You then have to resort to cutting and pasting data in Excel once again to compare your private company’s revenue performance to that of your competitor and the industry. You get the data on your industry and your competitor (a public company) from an industry analyst web site. You then combine it manually with your own company’s revenue data in Excel.
What should have taken you minutes ends up taking hours. The process was so tedious and labor intensive that it’s hard to avoid mistakes. And, if you decide to repeat the analysis a few days later, you’ll have to start from scratch, you can’t simply “refresh” the data. Some companies refer to this as “Excel hell.” Does it sound familiar?
Say Goodbye to Cutting and Pasting
If you need quick access to your company’s data, along with other information from the Internet, you now have a simple and affordable alternative to “Excel hell.” New software as a service (SaaS) business intelligence solutions deliver the answers you need on-demand. After a quick set-up, all you need to do is connect to the web and view the business analytics you need to be successful.
The sales operations director who was trying to combine data