Sales Analytics and Metrics that Matter

Avinash Kaushik wrote a great post on "useless web metrics" that discusses how an over abundance of data and easier access to it have contributed to an overwhelming explosion of reports and metrics. However, not all metrics are created equal. The recommendation is to question the validity and impact of all metrics and discard the ones that fail to produce a recommendation for an action. While Avinash focuses on Web Analytics, the same applies to most Business Intelligence or Reporting efforts, particularly "Sales Analytics".

Leading CRM/SFA platforms like salesforce.com enable sales organizations to report on their data easily and reliably. But not because we can create a lot of reports it means that we should. For many, extracting the right data to analyze and deriving true insight might seem like an art difficult to master but in reality it is more of a predictable science. Traditional reporting platforms require a skilled analyst to explore the data, identify trends and patterns, create hypothesis, test them, interpret the results and then create actionable recommendations. This process has 3 key weaknesses:

1) Inefficient. Even with intuitive point and click interfaces, creating and maintaining these reports is time consuming and it gets worse as data volumes increase.

2) Error prone. Without intelligent automation it is easy to accidentally miss certain conditions or critical dimensions from the analysis (we'll discuss Simpson's Paradox in a future post)

3) Unscalable. Effective quantitative analysis is a powerful skill in short demand, this means that the quality of the analysis might vary based on the analyst who prepared it. It also makes it difficult to handle employee turnover.

One way to overcome these challenges is to use better analysis techniques, like predictive analytics and data mining. A modern data mining platform excels at analyzing large amounts of data, automatically without getting tired. You can save hundreds of hours by letting the software identify the right data patterns that are impacting your business and you can eliminate the risk of overlooking critical information. Predictive models study your historical performance and can learn to predict future events. This codified knowledge can be shared within your organization and it will always produce consistent results and recommendations regardless of the person conducting the analysis.

Data mining and predictive analytics can filter the noise, save you time and produce better results, so you can take action and avoid having to ask "so what?".

Do you have any best practices to manage the growth of reports and metrics that you would like to share?

Predictive Sales Analytics vs. Sales Data Analysis

A few days ago we had an interesting conversation with one of our prospects. This company had a strong growth in 2009 and for 2010 was looking to deploy sales analytics as a competitive advantage. This company had developed an evaluation criteria and one of their key requirements was the ability to support 'drill to detail and ad-hoc report creation'.

As we began to explore use cases, we learned that this requirement came from the need to identify and analyze the differences between deals won and lost. This is a common and important analysis but the key is how to achieve it most accurately and most effectively.

This company had an already stretched operations group and although they were looking forward to better tools they did not have a lot of extra time to do data analysis nor did they have room for additional headcount. The head of sales and regional managers were interested in the results but their focus was in the sales operations and they had no interest in performing the role of data analysts either.

This is an important difference between traditional reporting or business intelligence tools and predictive analytics. Predictive analytics leverages data mining techniques that can perform millions of sophisticated computations and automatically discover data patterns. These capabilities far outperform even the best analysts both in accuracy and cost.

For our prospect, this capability came as a surprise. Sales analytics have evolved significantly over the past couple of years and although predictive analytics have been widely used by marketeers for quite some time, it was not until recently that predictive analytics began to make inroads in sales applications.

We are excited to help our prospect increase revenue with predictive analytics and become another cloud analytics success story.

in2clouds on the Forrester Blog

Borris Evelson has a new blog post about Business Intelligence in the Cloud. He includes a list of vendors like IBM, SAS, in2clouds and others. Boris reviews the state of the industry and provides some useful criteria for those considering a BI solution in the Cloud.

in2clouds on the BeyeNETWORK

David Wells wrote an excellent article on cloud analytics. We are honored to be mentioned as one of the providers of predictive analytics on the cloud. We feel confident that the combination of cloud computing and advanced analytics will be a tremenouds source of competitive advantage for companies over the next decade. While many challenges remain the tangible progress can't be ignored. This will be a marathon and we are just getting started.

Salesforce.com Selects in2clouds as Finalist in Force.com Forty Innovation Showcase

We are happy to announce that Salesforce.com selected in2clouds' predictive analytics engine as a finalist in the Force.com Innovation Showcase. in2clouds is the only analytics application to make it to the final:

“Customers look to salesforce.com partners like in2clouds to extend the value of their Salesforce CRM deployment,” said Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com. “With solutions such as what in2clouds demonstrated during Force.com Forty, salesforce.com customers have access to innovative enterprise applications that help them run their organizations better. It’s this unique value that becomes apparent during the Force.com Forty competition.” 

With more than a thousand applications on the AppExchange we are very pleased to be recognized as one of the 40 most innovative applications in 2009. Check out the full release.

in2clouds recognized by Website Magazine

Website Magazine delivers expert information to succeed on the Internet, backed with daily news online, email newsletters and exclusive digital content. In one of their latest articles, Website Magazine highlights some of Salesforce's "popular and and downright nifty applications". Click here for the full arcticle

Analytics Top Priority for CIOs

A new study by IBM reveals that leveraging analytics to improve business decision making is a top priority for CIOs. At in2clouds we could not agree more. We also think that the timing for companies to improve their analytics capabilities is perfect. Cloud computing and predictive analytics make it possible to deliver actionable insight faster and easier than ever before. Today companies of all size can use analytics to turbo charge their business performance without having to break the bank or hire rocket scientists.