Emergence of Business Intelligence and impact on Sales & Marketing

Marketing with Business Intelligence

If you remember the history of mining, generally coal miners used birds to identify the presence of poisonous gases like mithane etc. Birds can sense even a small amount of such gases and thus were able to save many lives in the mining fields which otherwise would not have been possible at that time.

These days Business Intelligence is used as a bird to identify the areas that are of very danger to any organizations and thus enables the respective departments to take the actions for improvement or to shut inefficient way of working and thus ultimately boosting the profitability. In any organization, we know that there is always a Marketing department but now Business Intelligence is also moving its place towards top management and thus it will be used into Marketing Strategies designed by them. Let us have a look at how these both can go together and benefit the organization.

We all know that marketing will have a huge pile of data and every-time when we need any analysis done then people rush to IT department for the data or asks the Analyst for it. Now in this way Business Intelligence can come into picture and drastically improve the ways of working.

Please have a look at three major ways a Business Intelligence can help in improving the efficiency of sales and marketing team.

1. Higher-profit Customers Identification and Focus.

Generally we evaluate the customer based on how big order it places while it might not be correct. Though Sales & Marketing people love the big order customers while actual valuations of a customer is done based on how consistently he is putting order. Business Intelligence can come into picture in this to identify the customer by frequency of orders, recency of orders, value of order to identify that who is actually your most valuable customer. This way it will help you identify where your profits are coming from and help you to plan your marketing towards them to better address their needs.

In this way, you can always focus on looking for the prospective customers with similar attributes in the business. With little efforts and good Business Intelligence Software, you can start ranking your customer. You can try ranking them on the basis of ranking initially and then you can add more attributes late on e.g timely payment, less complaints, growth in order etc.

Once you complete this activity, you can plan for the 2 things to be done. First thing is to strategies the new customer acquisition in accordance with higher value customer based on ranking and focus on developing those customer products. Secondly, you can think of replacing the low value customer based on ranking with the higher value customer and design the product mix accordingly to meet this objective.

2. Increasing Sales Forecast

Information about future revenues answers "what to" to sell, whom to sell and when to sell. Its accuracy and timeliness will definitely improve your forecasting and help your strategies perform better. Research also agrees with it that when the forecast is best matched with great accuracy, organization will always be showing signs of higher margins, low inventory and perfect order fill rates.

By leveraging the inputs provided by Business Intelligence, marketing and sales can forecast more accurately with various parameters e.g. seasonal demands, slow moving items, various product mix doing well, geographical demands etc. Thus Business Intelligence will improve the accuracy of forecast as it will provide the right information on hand with great analysis. Business Intelligence give key analytical information right away to the decision makers to take right decisions in right direction. Better information helps to forecast more accurate resulting in the better inventory management, promotion activities and procurement related decisions as well.

3. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness

Business Intelligence also provide the insight into the effectiveness of your various promotional activities under marketing and help in planning, executing and achieving better results based on the information which will be key indicators. This will help you plan your marketing budgets and you can shift your marketing budgets from one low performing promotional activity which is giving less ROI to the other good performing promotional activities that reap better ROI.

From getting the most accurate inputs from BI you can really find out the revenue generating activities and non-performing activities. In this manner you can keep track of returns from every penny spent on any activity. You can also check the expected results Vs actual results from information. As a matter of fact you will be able to make smarter choice for your sales and marketing based in this.

According to one research, effective use of the Business Intelligence will lead to better customer retention, higher revenues, cross-selling campaigns which will ultimately give you a happy customer and we all know that HAPPY CUSTOMER means MORE REVENUES FOR YOUR COMPANY.

So make use of this brilliant tools for upgrading you business sales and marketing and achieve exponential growth.