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Leverage analytics and mobile apps
to boost sales productivity.
Unlock the value of your SFA/CRM system:
Copyright InformationAll Contents Copyright © 2015 MicroStrategy Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.
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All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Specifications subject to change without notice. MicroStrategy is not responsible for errors or omissions. MicroStrategy makes no warranties or commitments concerning the availability of future products or versions that may be planned or under development.
Patent InformationThis product is patented. One or more of the following patents may apply to the product sold herein: U.S. Patent Nos. 6,154,766, 6,173,310, 6,260,050, 6,263,051, 6,269,393, 6,279,033, 6,567,796, 6,587,547, 6,606,596, 6,658,093, 6,658,432, 6,662,195, 6,671,715, 6,691,100, 6,694,316, 6,697,808, 6,704,723, 6,741,980, 6,765,997, 6,768,788, 6,772,137, 6,788,768, 6,798,867, 6,801,910, 6,820,073, 6,829,334, 6,836,537, 6,850,603, 6,859,798, 6,873,693, 6,885,734, 6,940,953, 6,964,012, 6,977,992, 6,996,568, 6,996,569, 7,003,512, 7,010,518, 7,016,480, 7,020,251, 7,039,165, 7,082,422, 7,113,993, 7,127,403, 7,174,349, 7,181,417, 7,194,457, 7,197,461, 7,228,303, 7,260,577, 7,266,181, 7,272,212, 7,302,639, 7,324,942, 7,330,847, 7,340,040, 7,356,758, 7,356,840, 7,415,438, 7,428,302, 7,430,562, 7,440,898, 7,486,780, 7,509,671, 7,516,181, 7,559,048, 7,574,376, 7,617,201, 7,725,811, 7,801,967, 7,836,178, 7,861,161, 7,861,253, 7,881,443, 7,925,616, 7,945,584, 7,970,782, 8,005,870, 8,051,168, 8,051,369, 8,094,788, 8,130,918 and 8,296,287. Other patent applications are pending.
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Executive summary
In today’s competitive business environment, corporate leaders
are routinely called upon to make rapid and crucial decisions.
Top managers realize that to stay ahead of the market and the
competition, they must be able to efficiently access company
data anytime, anywhere. Advanced business analytics and mobile
applications make this possible. These tools have begun to eliminate
the previous challenges associated with accessing, visualizing, and
analyzing data wherever you may be, allowing you and your sales
team to maximize your company’s sales potential. In this white paper,
we will explain how this is accomplished.
With advances in business intelligence (BI) tools, data stored in Sales
Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) systems can be analyzed in a multitude of ways. For example,
your sales and marketing teams can identify sales trends, answer
crucial client questions, and allow real-time mobile selling. By using
these applications to their full potential, your company can stay
on top of sales cycles, contacts, and pipelines, leading to increased
revenue growth.
To unleash this potential, four key SFA and CRM challenges must
be targeted:
• Difficulty getting the data needed to effectively run your business.
• A lack of advanced analytical capabilities.
• A weak set of standard visualizations.
• Incomplete field access to valuable sales resources.
By overcoming these four challenges, you will get the most from
your SFA and CRM data and increase the return on investment for
these systems. Information that was once used exclusively for basic
sales, marketing, and customer service processes will be accessible
for visual analysis by all departments, improving forecasts and
optimizing resources.
This white paper will articulate how to quickly address these
four challenges. It will further explain how businesses are using
interactive dashboards, stunning visualizations, and superior analytics
to improve performance and rise above their competition. Lastly, it
will illustrate how the addition of mobile applications dramatically
increases the use of SFA and CRM platforms, maximizing sales
representative productivity.
The four challenges of SFA and CRM systems
Challenge 1: Difficulty getting the data you needed to
effectively run your business
Your latest product line is selling out in Paris, but inventory is stagnant
in Vancouver. Demand has been growing in Tokyo and slowing in
London. At times like this, you need comprehensive data that can help
you draw meaningful insights. You must be able to tap into historical
CRM data and other data sources on supplies, marketing, and markets.
Comprehensive data from a variety of sources allows you to examine
market changes over the past year, helping you understand how to
reallocate resources to control or reduce expenses and maximize sales.
Getting all the information you need to run your business has been
a challenge, commonly due to (1) SFA and CRM capacity restraints
where additional storage is usually sold at a premium and (2)
attempting to synchronize tools that were not built for integration
with one another.
Without the ability to consolidate information from different
sources and access historical information, the risk for data
latency, inaccessibility, and inconsistency grows. Unreliable and
incomprehensive data degrades sales reps’ and managers’ abilities
to skillfully analyze sales, customers, competitors, and industry
trends. Independently accessing various silos of information wastes
resources and makes it difficult to carry out decisions based on a
holistic view of enterprise data.
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Business analytics tools enable you to visualize and drill into
comprehensive data to pinpoint sales trends and answer complex
questions, such as:
• Do specific industries respond to certain products?
• Can I predict sales related to seasonality?
• Are there competitors we are losing to in specific industries for
specific application areas?
• What is the true profit and loss for sales territories?
Advanced business analytics tools can help you overcome known
challenges with SFA and CRM systems to assist you in answering the
business questions that matter. They ensure reports and dashboards
are dependable, so different teams can collaborate and have
productive conversations with one another, and with customers. All
departments and clients can be comfortable knowing that their data
is comprehensive and consistent. This facilitates cooperation and
drives higher close rates, ultimately helping your organization grow.
Challenge 2: A lack of advanced analytical capabilities
Friday morning you receive a summary of the latest sales forecast
report, which includes sales quota and actual sales data. It appears
that sales are slowing. At this rate, you might not meet your quota
this quarter. You drill into the actual-versus-forecasted sales report
for a break down of figures by individual sales representatives. From
there, you can drill across to view the sales pipeline of a particular rep.
It is possible that someone is not receiving the support he or she
needs in order to close an opportunity.
SFA and CRM tools are unable to support this type of predictive
analytics and drilling. With the addition of leading business analytics
tools, you now have access to the advanced analytics needed to
resolve complex questions and anticipate trends.
There are two areas in particular where SFA and CRM systems
fall short:
1. Advanced and predictive analytics—Advanced and predictive
analytics give business users and data analysts full investigative
power into all aspects of an organization’s data. Sales teams are
able to gain new and deeper insights into their accounts. Lead
scoring models help organizations identify accounts most likely to
close so appropriate resources can be reallocated.
2. Online analytical processing (OLAP)— SFA and CRM tools do not
deliver when it comes to OLAP-style analytics. OLAP capabilities,
such as slicing, dicing, and drilling, are often limited (or in some
cases nonexistent), which means that organizations are unable to
extend their analyses into every corner of their data warehouse.
Sales managers need the ability to look at a regional dashboard
and drill across to product-level data. This capability can help them
grasp how varying levels of product demand may be affecting
revenue in particular regions. This type of understanding is crucial
to optimizing earning potential.
Integrating a business analytics platform with your SFA and CRM
systems empowers you with the predictive analysis needed to make
quick and impactful decisions.
Challenge 3: A weak set of standard visualizations
As part of a new upsell program, you need to investigate product
performance and identify growth opportunities. You bring up a
dashboard containing cutting-edge maps, allowing you to perform
white space analysis. It is apparent that there are untapped sales
opportunities in Southeast Asia. You drill into Southeast Asia and
the surrounding regions to interpret buying patterns within existing
accounts. An advanced graph matrix helps you identify products not
being sold, and network visualizations help you with affinity analysis.
The best way to understand your data is to visualize it, but SFA and
CRM systems provide a poor set of standard visualizations. The
visualizations are usually limited to static bar and pie charts.
A comprehensive business analytics platform can provide a rich
library of advanced visualizations, including maps, networks, and
graph matrix visualizations. Users can interact with their visualizations
and change them as they see fit. With a business analytics platform,
every user has the power to be a professional data-journalist.
Challenge 4: Incomplete access to valuable sales
resources in the field
You have finished your afternoon sales presentation and the client
is ready to sign a new deal. You present her with the agreement and
get her signature on your tablet. With time left in your day, you access
the GPS data in your mobile app to find another nearby prospect.
After a stop to introduce yourself and your new product line, you
finish the day at the airport gate. There, you use your tablet to enter
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the latest opportunity or account data into the company SFA and
CRM systems, create presentation visuals for an upcoming meeting,
and map out travel for the week. Sophisticated mobile apps make
these tasks all possible.
Tablet devices have ushered in a whole new era for field sales. Many
of their inherent features, such as intuitive touch-screen displays,
instant on, long battery life, GPS, and 3G/4G Internet access become
powerful tools when combined with the sales-focused business apps
that run on them.
Some businesses are reluctant to move forward in developing
a mobile strategy because they have invested heavily in an SFA
or CRM system for which they have yet to realize the anticipated
ROI. Ironically though, mobile sales apps—which are sometimes
incorrectly perceived as an extraneous investment—boost ROI on
existing investments.
Mobile apps boost sales rep productivity and improve customer
engagement by providing compelling intelligence and visualizations.
Sales reps and clients are able to easily interact with data on a
mobile device, creating an enjoyable and engaging experience.
When combined with SFA, CRM, or other sales-related data, mobile
apps give reps a complete toolkit for projecting a cutting-edge
appearance in front of customers and working optimally in the field.
4,192
3,559
3,527
3,446
3,208
2,977
2,893
Standard visuatlizations
Advanced visuatlizations
With sophisticated mobile apps, business moves in real time. Sales
professionals with mobile access have a constant connection to data
and analytics, multimedia content, market intelligence, and product
information. This makes it possible to create engaging presentations
and answer client questions on the spot.
Unlock the value of your SFA and CRM with MicroStrategy
Business analytics and mobile solutions, such as those powered by
MicroStrategy’s Analytics and Mobile Platforms, help organizations
overcome the four challenges outlined here. They protect and
enhance SFA and CRM investments. They deliver deep insights with
interactive reports and dashboards containing comprehensive data,
superior analytics, and stunning visuals. Simply put, they radically
improve your organization’s performance and revenue growth.
In addition to increasing the ROI of SFA and CRM systems,
MicroStrategy’s Analytics and Mobile Platforms integrate seamlessly
with your existing systems. This frees up money and IT resources for
use on other high priority projects. MicroStrategy’s out-of-the-box
connectors to SFA and CRM systems, like Salesforce, ensure an easy,
seamless integration with no custom coding required.
Once connected, organizations can rapidly build and deliver reports,
dashboards, and mobile apps using all their relevant enterprise
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data. The MicroStrategy Platform employs a unitary architecture
designed organically from the ground up, offering the ability to
build reports
or dashboards once, deploying them anywhere—web, email,
mobile, and within documents. Everyone, from sales representatives
in the field to the President of Sales, can access consistent and
reliable reports and dashboards.
The MicroStrategy Analytics Platform also provides robust advanced
analytics that enable complex questions to be answered. Out-of-
the-box access to over 300 functions allows users to perform more
complex analytics as their analyses mature and needs change—
functions like data summarization, trend analysis, benchmarking,
relationship analysis, and projections.
For the most complex questions, MicroStrategy also has a tight
integration with R, an open source, statistical programming
language. Drill-anywhere capabilities give users unlimited and
immediate investigative analysis. Users can drill to any corner of
their data warehouse. These capabilities power sales teams to
perform advanced calculations.
MicroStrategy’s stunning data visualizations help you come to
conclusions quickly and intuitively. These visualizations go beyond
the traditional bar graphs and pie charts to advanced network
visualizations, graph matrices, geographical maps, and more.
Users can access and combine hundreds of data sources and
build dashboards containing several visualizations to perform
comprehensive data discovery.
With MicroStrategy Mobile, you can deploy dynamic native Mobile
Sales Enablement (MSE) applications that bring together analytics,
rich multimedia content, and write-back transactions. Since
connectivity in the field is not always guaranteed, MicroStrategy
Mobile apps provide online or offline access to all your important
sales information and tools.
MicroStrategy empowers you to maximize your sales organization’s
potential and improve business growth by unlocking the full potential
of your SFA or CRM systems. Ultimately, your business can deliver
deeper insights and answer the important questions needed to
increase revenue growth.
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