How Business Intelligence can Benefit your Sales and Marketing
By: Joseph Tall
Tags: B2b Marketing, B2B, Lead Generation, B2b Sales

Business Intelligence or BI is a set of processes and technologies that can derive relevant and meaningful information from raw business data. This information can be used by various organizational functions such as sales and marketing to improve business actions and decisions. With Business and Sales Intelligence Solutions businesses can gain better insight into their side of the business. Data continues to influence decision making in sales and marketing strategies.

Business benefits of Business Intelligence:

It analyzes consumer buying patterns in order to develop products and services that caters to their current consumption needs.

It provides visibility into which products are selling most in the market to identify the areas of low-selling products and create strategies around it.

It helps to use meaningful data to manage sales or marketing processes and identify potential selling opportunities.

It helps to improve overall organizational efficiency through shared information that can improve productivity and save time.

The information that we get through BI tools can help increase sales performance and conversions by analysing customer interaction data with your business through CRM tools.

It also acquires competitive intelligence through marketing insights used by your competitors and plans future actions accordingly.

Business Intelligence can benefit marketing in the following ways:

Determine the ROI of your marketing strategy:

Today’s market is saturated with social media platforms, apps, pay-per-click ads, analytical tools, B2B lead generation tools. BI is vital in helping to determine the Return on Investment for small businesses to figure out if the marketing strategy they invested in is producing results. BI can translate analytical reports where businesses can make wise decisions on solid research, facts, data, intuition, gut, intuition and assumption. Reports can give you a much bigger and better picture of what’s working and what’s not.

2. Define and target the right demographics:

The success of any marketing campaign depends upon sending the right message at the right time to the right consumer. An effective BI solution can collect demographic data about consumers from various online platforms and present a unified view of their buying patterns, age groups, product line preferred by them and much more.

3. Derive knowledge from a sea of data:

Business Intelligence today is more vital than ever. 90% of the data which is present today is derived from the last two year. The rate of data creation is only going to accelerate. The reason behind this is an explosion on social media channels. Business Intelligence is an art of deriving data and knowledge from all the business processes to help enterprises gain a competitive advantage to better understand customer needs and market dynamics. It helps build long term customer relationships.

3. Holistic view of your business:

BI is the key to your entire business information. This includes business insights and customer related data. Customer data can be derived from Newsletters subscription list, CRM, Email Campaigns, social media engagement, website traffic and all this data can be arranged in a holistic view. Your team can use this data to engage with your customers in a more personalized way. Similarly, you can put all your business information like financial reports, sales figures, employee records, marketing campaigns, competitor activities in a holistic view. Without a single consolidated view of your business as well as your customer, it will be difficult to address their requirements and meet business goals.

Business Intelligence in sales can benefit in the following ways:

Today in this competitive world, BI powered sales data can help acquire larger market shares and revenue. It provides timely support to sales reps through sales intelligence and helps provide better services to customers.

To make more sales to existing customers:

To the online world, customer retention or selling to an existing customer is more cost effective and profitable as compared to selling to the new customer. A study suggests that the probability of selling to an existing customer is upto 14 times higher than selling to a new customer. BI tools help sales professionals to keep a track of what their existing customers are buying. Based on this information, you can target them with specific sales campaigns and opportunities. Your best customer might be the one who is consistently placing good sized orders or services with you. With BI tools, you can rank your customers based on the frequency, recency, value of their purchase to determine the best customers. After getting an accurate profile of best customers you can better focus marketing efforts to target similar prospects. For instance, your customer is buying HR software but not payroll service, you can create marketing campaigns targeting that specific opportunity.

2. Makes your sales forecast more accurate:

With BI, you can improve the speed and accuracy of sales forecasts after accommodating information based on promotional campaigns, seasonal product demands such as what you’re going to sell, whom you’re going to sell and when you will make the sale. This information can have immense value. It can improve the accuracy of forecasting, leading to other benefits like revenue forecasting, procurements, inventory management, product promotions, seasonal demand, slow-moving items, casualties, outliers and other key factors. The reliability of forecast is much improved when the right information is at the hand to support the underlying analysis.

3. Measure the performance of your sales promotional campaign:

With the use of BI tools, companies can now maximise their revenue generated from spending on advertising and marketing campaigns. BI can be used to measure how customers are reacting to your marketing campaigns and allocate resources for the more successful campaigns to produce the best possible ROI.

4. Provide better customer service:

As you track sales and analyze customer buying habits, you can create a complete picture of customers’ business needs. With data in hand, your sales team can walk with confidence in a meeting with your customer to respond to their questions, discuss potential opportunities for cost savings, introduce new products to increase your sales and review current stock levels to avoid inventory challenges. As you and your team learn more about your customer, you can provide better service, earn loyalty and strengthen relationships.

5. Make data driven decisions:

To keep with the competitors , you need to access current information about your business and you need to use this information to drive decisions. Decisions based on emotions or intuition pose risks that you cannot afford to take. Having accurate timely data at your fingertips will make it easier for you and your team to take justified actions. You can approach performance reviews with insights that can help to achieve higher sales and mend broken customer relationships. You can check if your team is ready to answer all the questions that come their way.

Conclusion:

Effective Business Intelligence can go a long way in analysing consumer behavior, determining the right sales and marketing channels and in making accurate sales forecasts. It can lead to better customer retention, higher revenues and enhanced level of customer satisfaction. In the end, a happy customer means more revenue for your company.