Practical Crm Analytics
Business Insight You Can Use
Business Insight You Can Use
Executive Summary
Analytics applications are designed to measure, predict, and optimize business performance; they are used to analyze specific data related to particular aspects of a business. Through analytics applications, analysts, managers, and executives have the information they require to identify trends and anomalies to better understandand act uponspecific business conditions.
This paper discusses how Pivotal CRM Analytics can help companies across a range of industries improve their effectiveness through practical, low-cost CRM analytics applications. Traditionally too costly, time-consuming, and complex for all but the largest companies, analytics is now accessible to companies of all sizes.
Analytics applications are designed to measure, predict, and optimize business performance; they are used to analyze specific data related to particular aspects of a business. Through analytics applications, analysts, managers, and executives have the information they require to identify trends and anomalies to better understandand act uponspecific business conditions.
In contrast to the traditional reporting tools widely used today, analytics solutions are well suited to real-time and ad hoc decision support. They offer complex information in an easy-to-understand format. Agile businesses can take advantage of these capabilities to explore information at will; with an analytics solution, managers have an effective tool for measuring results and meeting business goals.
Its no secret, however, that only the largest companiesthose with deep pockets and substantial resourcescan afford the time and cost usually required for large-scale data warehousing and analytics projects. When smaller businesses attempt to implement light versions of analytics systems designed for mammoth enterprises, their experiences are often marred by unnecessary complexity and disappointing results. These systems are usually too complex for the average user, and too unwieldy for modestly sized IT departments to implement and support appropriately. And the time-to-benefit is far too long.
Frustrated by the barriers of cost and limited resources, many enterprises are forced to build their own makeshift analytics applications based on interconnected spreadsheets, static reports, and scattered data sources. However, these homegrown solutions stretch IT resources beyond capacityand they rarely enable users to truly analyze information.
Companies seeking quick results, predictable costs, and an opportunity to leverage existing resources and familiar tools need a better solution.
This paper discusses how Pivotal CRM Analytics can help companies across a range of industries improve their effectiveness through practical, low-cost CRM analytics applications. Traditionally too costly, time-consuming, and complex for all but the largest companies, analytics is now accessible to companies of all sizes.
Reporting Versus Analytics: How They Differ
The ability to track sales trends, expenses, growth, and other key metrics is vital to the success of any sales & marketing organization. While reporting can provide a snapshot of the required key performance indicators at any point in time, managers, VPs, and directors require a deeper level of functionalitythe ability to interact with the data to find out why and how. This enables them to monitor the health of the company dependably over time to quickly spot declining profitability and eroding market share, and facilitate rapid responses to new opportunities.
The Essence of Reporting
Reporting applications present a detailed view of a business situation by extracting data from database tables and presenting them in a report. These reports often involve sophisticated formatting and they are based on the relational data model.
Reporting lets users validate anomalies or trends that are already known by drilling down into subsets of data contained in a report. Reports are static presentations of data, so they do not enable users to analyze or model data to identify potential trends or anomalies. Because of this, reporting cannot be used to study historical data for developing trends; it cannot be used to analyze data to judge whether or not an action is required.
Individual reports are created to present the state of existing information; it is up to users to interpret and derive meaningful information from them. Reporting is also an iterative process. A lot of manual effort goes into the preparation of data in order to display a report in a pre-determined format
Very little flexibility exists in the reporting process, which often results in considerable delays between decisions. Furthermore, reporting is driven from a relational database. Information from alternative data sources is not available, limiting the scope of the results reports can present.
The Essence of Analytics
Relational databases store entities in discrete tables; this structure is good for operational databases, but for complex multi-table queries it is relatively slow. Analytics applications, on the other hand, are made possible through the multi-dimensional OLAP data model. The advantage of using OLAP to answer queries is speed.
In most businesses, managers operate either from the position of knowing a problem exists and needing to articulate a solution, or of not being certain where the problem is and needing to find it before they can determine a solution. Analytics is effective in both of these situations.
Managers can use analytics applications to explore and navigate data by dimensions, which provides a big-picture view of a business situation. They can view, investigate, and act upon potentially unknown anomalies and trends presented visually through front-end viewers such as Microsoft Excel.
Analytics can also be used to measure current performance against some historical baseline. This capability enables managers to align the information provided through a daily monitoring process with corporate or departmental objectives. The results of multi-dimensional analysis can be displayed in a dashboard or portal to represent the outcome of analyzing a particular problem.
Criteria for a Practical CRM Analytics Solution
Improving operational efficiency, increasing competitiveness, growing revenuesthese are issues for any business, regardless of size or resources. The appropriate tools for attaining these goals, however, do differ by company. Unless a business has high risk tolerance, boundless resources, and a willingness to wait years before seeing a return on investment, it needs analytics software better suited to its project timelines and financial resources. Practical businesses need software that works as promised, is easy to use, and demonstrates measurable results within weeks or monthsnot years.
Enterprises seeking a practical end-to-end analytics solution should search out a system that meets the following criteria:
Quick Results.
Modular Design. Predictable and Tolerable Costs..
Available Resources and Familiar Tools..
Flexibility and Interoperability
Industry-Specific Functionality
Pivotal CRM Analytics
CRM analytics are a necessity for any successful company, regardless of size. Pivotal CRM Analytics is an open, flexible, low-risk business intelligence solution for enterprises that want practical analysis capabilities that give them insight they can act on. It provides new levels of information richness and usability to professionals throughout the enterprise and in the field. All users, from sales executives to front-line personnel, can get up-to-the-moment and complete insight thats personalized, relevant, and usable.
Built on Microsofts integrated business intelligence (BI) platform, Pivotal CRM Analytics is packaged with the data mart schema, data integration, and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) routines required to quickly implement a solution and realize benefits immediately. Featuring the flexibility of a business intelligence (BI) tool framework, combined with the usability of a pre-packaged analytics application, Pivotal CRM Analytics delivers a cost-effective solution for deploying and customizing a decision-support system.
Richer Business Insight
Organization-Wide Availability
Lower Infrastructure Costs
Faster, Easier Implementation
Scalable, Reliable, Secure Platform
The Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform
A business intelligence solution helps organizations gain insight, which leads to better, faster, and more relevant business decisions. The data management capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server combined with the Microsoft Office System, including Microsoft Excel, makes it possible to build an end-to-end business intelligence solution that is both comprehensive and cost-effective, turning corporate data into useful information that facilitates better, timelier business decisions.
The Microsoft BI platform is primarily made up of two components, Microsoft SQL Server and the Microsoft Office productivity suite. SQL Server provides the back-end analytics engine used for staging and warehousing, while Office System productivity tools offer a rich and simplified user interface. Together, they represent a familiar infrastructure for building analytics on the Microsoft BI platform.
Microsofts BI technology platform helps extend a wide variety of third-party applications across vertical industries and throughout organizations. The Pivotal CRM team brings value to existing investments in the Microsoft platform by incorporating Microsoft BI technology into Pivotal CRM Analytics, delivering seamless analysis and reporting on underlying data.
Practical Analytics Means Analytics for Everyone
Most analytics solutions are aimed squarely at analysts, who tend to focus on tactical and strategic decisions that influence business performance. But at the operational level, end users are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data associated with the task at hand, and they rarely have the time or tools to digest it properly. In the absence of business intelligence, users continue to make thousands of uninformed decisions, none of which are very strategic, but all of which are extremely important to customer satisfaction, retention, and (ultimately) long-term profitability.
The traditional tendency to make business intelligence available only to executives, middle managers, and professional analysts has ignored the decision-support needs of users such as customer service reps, sales reps, and account managersuntil now. Pivotal CRM Analytics helps all types of decision-makers understand customer buying patterns, identify sales and profit growth opportunities, and improve overall decision-making:
Analysts - Analytics provides these sophisticated power users with the multi-dimensional analytics they require to be able to effectively slice and dice, drill down, and discover trends and anomalies in data.
Managers - Pivotal CRM Analytics provides the key capabilities managers need to answer common sales and marketing questions
Pivotal CRM Analytics in Action
The Sales VP
A sales VP deals with a range of issues: falling short on sales forecasts, increasing sales expenses, declining customer satisfaction, ineffective sales reps, inaccurate forecasting, and difficulty monitoring sales trends. With a Pivotal CRM Analytics solution, the sales VP can track, measure, and understand key performance indicators (KPIs). It becomes possible to keep a scorecard to drive the sales organization. It also becomes possible to scan aggregate data for trends and patterns that reveal new opportunities.
The Sales Director
Sales directors need to manage the business performance of their teams and ensure execution on business strategies. What challenges often arise? Difficulty forecasting sales accurately and identifying ineffective sellers on the team. A Pivotal CRM Analytics solution makes it possible for the sales director to monitor sales forecasts and analyze the performance of each sales rep in relation to these forecasts, to uncover top performers and underperformers.
The Marketing VP
A marketing VP is thrown a handful of crucial issues that need immediate action: declining market share, ineffective new product introductions and promotions, high client dissatisfaction, difficulty positioning new products and services, an inability to get new products to market quickly, and poor access to relevant market data. Where do they even start? With a Pivotal CRM Analytics solution, they can quickly view the relationship between business dimensions to uncover anomalies. Then they can lead targeted campaigns based on history, trends, buying habits, and inventory levels.
The Business Analyst
A business analyst has trouble analyzing data in a business context due to poor access to the relevant pieces of information. It exists, but where and how do they get it? First and foremost, they need a business view of the data to perform both what if analysis, and pattern identification. A Pivotal CRM Analytics solution provides these capabilities.
Conclusion
A CRM analytics solution is a powerful tool for exploring and navigating data by dimensions to provide a big-picture view of a business situation. Analysis of customer data makes it possible to view, investigate, and act upon potentially unknown anomalies and trends, leading to smarter, more informed decision-making.
However, most enterprises do not have the resources, tolerance for risk, or willingness to wait years before seeing a return on their investment in an analytics solution. These organizations need software better suited to their project timelines and financial resourcessoftware that delivers on its promises, is easy to use, and demonstrates measurable results quickly.
Pivotal CRM Analytics solutions are designed for practical businesses that want insightful decision support, without committing to major expenditures and years of implementation, and customization. Built around the criteria of quick results, modular design, predictable and tolerable costs, capitalizing on available resources and familiar tools, flexibility and interoperability, and industry-specific functionality, the Pivotal CRM team delivers practical CRM analytics solutions for todays agile enterprise.
by: CDC Pivotal CRM
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