7 Ways business intelligence helps businesses grow

Many business owners have made a fortune whilst following what they call ‘gut-feeling’ or intuition. Industry experts argue that making million-dollar deals, based on some mystical source is not logical at all. The explanation for intuition or gut-feeling is simple, it’s the ability of a business owner to match, assess and work on a current scenario by recalling a similar event in their past, subconsciously. However, to take a massive advantage of your intuition, you need to have a past experience.

In this article, we will be covering a few ways business intelligence helps businesses grow. The digitized age of business tools has enabled users to take the help of technology and use it for their immense growth, and the most common example of such tools is Power BI. Business intelligence allows small, medium and large enterprises to use the power of big data by analyzing the same and come up with trends and solutions.

What is business intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a combination of tools, technologies, applications, and practices that help businesses in collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting raw data into insightful and actionable business information. BI is made up of

• Data mining
• Analytical processing
• Querying and reporting

What is the purpose of business intelligence?

The major purpose that Business Intelligence serves for a business is helping the corporate executives, business managers, and other operational heads take better data-driven business decisions. Many companies are using BI for cost-cutting, identifying better business opportunities, and spotting inefficient business processes.

What are the benefits of using business intelligence?

The major benefits that business intelligence provides are directly derived from the purpose it serves in the modern business scenario. Business intelligence helps in:

• Accelerating decision-making process
• Optimizing internal business processes
• Increasing the operational efficiency
• Driving revenues
• Gaining competitive advantages
• Identifying the market trends
• Spotting addressable business problems

The major issue in the modern business scenario is that business owners often mix business analytics with business intelligence. A business owner must understand that the core of BI is reporting not process management. Business intelligence has the power of transforming organizations; however, this is not implemented because business owners lack the knowledge of

• What BI involves?
• Where should they start?
• How long does the result take to show?

Let’s explore the bits and pieces of business intelligence and guide you towards the path that will help you transform your business process; making you successful.

1. Smarter decision-making process

Being a business owner or at the managerial level having a firm grip on your organizational data is important. Information doesn’t generally mean intelligence especially it is scattered all around the organization.

The sole purpose if business intelligence is to get your organizational information structured and analyzable. Business intelligence enables businesses in strategic decision-making. Having a system in place that keeps your organizational at a centralized location and up-to-date, leads to better business decisions and superior financial performance.

A smart sales CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution plays a pivotal role as it bridges the gap between managers and subordinates. The gap is bridged as the system delivers a range of key business metrics such as

• Productivity
• Team performance
• Customer product/service preferences
• Sales cycles
• Customer purchase behavior
• Core customers
• Revenues and
• Market trends

All these metrics have their own sets of data that are compiled inside sales CRM. The CRM then uses its reporting feature for analyzing this bulk data. Once the analysis is done by the CRM system it provides the data in the form of facts and figures which the upper management of a company uses to pinpoint any discrepancies. In short, the business owner, rather than going for the intuition, backs his decision with hard facts that the CRM reports to him.

2. Improved customer service

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou

It’s all about providing world class customer experience to your customer base. Your business will thrive or bite the dust depending on the level of customer satisfaction level.

Making an impression on your customers makes sure that they return to make more purchases from you in the future. Eight percent of current customer base can generate 40 percent of your entire income.

Business intelligence can source and compile the data of your repeat customers. Based on the collected data you can easily create strategies for attracting your current customer base to make more purchases. Business intelligence helps business owners to provide customers with a data-driven experience that helps them keep sailing their organizational boat amongst their competition.

3. Better customer knowledge

Customers are less receptive towards what you want to sell to them. They are changing with the market dynamics and want a solution to their problem. In the past few years, the journey from developing an initial interest towards a product or service, to the point where customers make a purchase, has seen a tremendous change. In simple words, customer engagement has trumped outrageous promotions.

There is an increasing demand for tools that come with built-in business Intelligence. Tools like CRM help their users in understanding how their customers are interacting with them in real-time. The CRM software also allows users to find the best possible ways of reaching out to their customers with accurate data.

CRM solutions work as critical tools that help in retrieving the customer intelligence necessary to adapt your business for the new age of customer journey.

In the previous sections, we have already stressed upon the need for pooling the data from each department of your organization such as

• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Operations
• Product development
• Finance

Doing so allows business intelligence to present a more holistic customer profile based on their interaction with your business along with their journey to becoming a paid customer or contributing to your churn.

This is true commercial intelligence, delivering detailed insight on buyer behavior and trends and allowing you to hone your sales, marketing, and business growth strategies accordingly.

Customer Experience (CX) has become the “new marketing battlefront” – with more than two thirds of marketers stating that their companies “compete mostly on the basis of CX.” – Gartner

Business intelligence helps businesses improve their customer knowledge so that they can take appropriate measures and drive their customer experience. The goal of every organization today is providing the best level of customer satisfaction and retention.

Business intelligence enables you to link every customer touchpoints, have immediate access to single customer view, ongoing service cases, purchase history and their current position in your sales cycle.

With this much insightful data at your disposal, segmenting customers based on their journey becomes easy. Based on this data you can target personalized customer experience strategies for various batches of customers. Doing so also allows business owners to use their resources optimally towards interested prospects so that they continue to meet their growth goals while maintaining the current customer base.

4. Better productivity

With the help of business intelligence, business owners can

• Get rid of bottlenecks
• Refine their business process
• Automate their daily tasks
• Be more organized
• Prioritize their tasks without manual labor

With a successful business intelligence implementation, businesses can provide better customer service, using salespeople’s selling time more productively. The efficiency of the business element enhances at the senior level with the automated reporting and intuitive dashboards. That allows them to track every single piece of information regarding contacts and deals with a few clicks.

With the centralization of data, the customer data is accessible by the upper management on any device via Cloud, cutting down the administration time. People who work on-the-go don’t need to make calls to their offices for retrieving every single piece of information. They can just add their daily updates inside the app and every information gets updated without extra manual effort, keeping the business data integrated.

5. Better ROI

The points discussed above point out only one single fact, improving the organization’s ROI. Return on investments is the priority of every business because that way they can quickly start focusing on generating extra revenue and expansion. CRM system that comes with built-in business intelligence tend to help businesses in improving their daily

• Sales efficiency,
• Sales deal conversion metrics
• Customer Experience

These systems help in analyzing the bulk data without taking up much time and help businesses craft their future growth strategies. With all the right insight and disciplines that are enabled by business intelligence software, businesses can easily capitalize on modern outlook towards handling their ongoing sales and after-sales services. This also saves the business owners from all the unnecessary cloud of hypotheses and preconceptions that generally set businesses on the wrong course.

6. Planning a better future for the business

Investment on better business intelligence software and equally skilled professionals for handling these tools allow businesses to boost their ability to anticipate the market trend and consumer buying traits.

Once businesses understand the consumer buying pattern they can create a plan that is derived from the comparison of the buying history and the projections made by the business intelligence tool. Doing so not only allows them to have a better knowledge about their customers, but it also allows optimal resource utilization.

7. Turning data into actionable information

2018 has seen big data play a major role in discovering the way consumers think, research, buy and churn. The rate of data creation will only accelerate in the coming time. The major reason for this acceleration is the boom in social media channels. The numbers or posts uploaded, the photos and videos added to the timeline, the tweets sent, etc are just going to increase the flow of data into the digital world.

A business that takes the first step in connecting their official social media channel with the business intelligence software will take advantage of developing trends, staying in touch with their customer base and be always top on customer service.

Making a sense of all that petabytes of data will be handled by business intelligence. All the collected data can be easily turned into actionable information which will help the businesses gain the much-required head-start that will keep them ahead of their competition.

Conclusion

There is a major myth that is going around that business intelligence is so expensive that only large corporations are reserved for utilizing its power. That is not the case. Modern CRM vendors such as Salesmate have been working with small and mid-size businesses whilst allowing them to use the power of business intelligence. BI is more accessible to the SMB’s today than ever before.

To get the most out of your investment on a business intelligence software ensure you choose a system like Salesmate CRM that will automatically analyze both the content and context of data that you collect. Salesmate CRM allows users to use the automation feature for various purposes that mitigate extensive manual labor and have more selling time.

• Integrate your website’s form with your CRM; the information collected by the system will automatically get created inside the CRM.
• The contact will get a welcome email based on the automation triggers your set inside the CRM system
• The same contact will get assigned to your sales reps with various sales activities planned against it.
• The reps will get reminders about the pending activities so there is no lapse in follow-up.
• Using SMS CRM, You can even automate text messages to your contacts mobile number using the built-in virtual phone system.

Salesmate CRM has many features to offer at a very competitive price that doesn’t blow a hole in the budget of SMBs. If you want to know more about Salesmate, its sales automation feature or the other ways this smart business intelligence system can assist in increasing your revenue, then do get in touch with us.