BI for Sales, Distribution & Marketing

The enterprise sales team requires up-to-date information to ensure appropriate focus on targets and goals and to understand where the sales region, sales team or individual stands against those targets and goals. While it is important to establish a sales forecast, the forecast itself does nothing to help the organisation achieve the sales goals and generate revenue. Sales team accountability and performance is critical to the organisation. Every team member must have an objective understanding of results, and sales managers must monitor, analyse and adapt targets and processes to achieve the best results for the enterprise.

BI for Sales with prebuilt KPI for Sales can help the sales director, sales manager and sales representative to analyse results by product, SKU, customer, customer demographic, region, team and sales individual. Using an intuitive, single view of data, the team can build a picture of sales, with data integrated from other enterprise systems including purchasing, production, sales contact systems, spreadsheets and other data sources. This information will help the team and the organisation to monitor and adjust targets and to better forecast and predict results. With BI for Sales, Sales managers can establish individual sales targets and monitor generated sales with drill down and drill through capability and comparison with previous historical periods in the same year or the same period for previous years. Users can find the source of a sales shortfall and correct the issue before it becomes a critical factor in weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual sales.

BI for Sales can provide insight into the sales metrics like customer buying behavior, booking patterns and competitor activity. BI for Sales can also enable sales and production staff to better align targets to ensure that inventories are at the appropriate level and that product and raw material is available to meet the sales demand, and to align sales efforts to a new marketing campaign or make other strategic, tactical or operational adjustments to goals and plan numbers.

To win and retain customers in today’s competitive business world, you must establish and maintain a seamless buying process. Marketing, sales, production, inventory management and distribution must be in sync to satisfy the customer requirement and provide products and services when the client is ready to buy, with the appropriate product to meet their needs.

Product availability and dependable distribution, shipping and delivery are paramount to every enterprise. Whether your organisation is distributing products as a supplier of parts and materials, or to retailers or consumers, you must anticipate product need, distribute, ship and track orders and advise customers of anticipated delivery dates to satisfy their requirements. Customer service representatives must know where the package is at any given time and when it is scheduled to arrive at the client location. Distribution is a key to the success of marketing efforts, to sales and to customer satisfaction.

True business intelligence can provide a critical foundation for distribution professionals and help the organisation to synchronise demand and supply, anticipate production needs, prepare and forecast distribution needs to satisfy seasonal, regional and customer requirements, and ensure that production, warehouse, sales, marketing and customer service professionals are working with the same information.

Your team can create a single, integrated view of data from disparate enterprise systems and data sources and use this information to establish personalised views that meet the requirements of the end-user. With simple, powerful analytics and tools, the user can establish metrics and KPI for Distribution and monitor and analyse results, with drill down and drill through features to determine the root cause of a problem. Your users can establish automated alerts and receive these alerts via email when a critical threshold has been crossed, or when a problem occurs.

Business Intelligence Software can provide simple, practical, affordable solution to satisfy your data analysis needs and ensure that your organisation has a clear picture of the distribution schedule, inventory levels, returns, product recalls, decreases and increases in customer orders, order status and delivery dates.

To achieve and sustain business success, every organisation must define and manage marketing objectives with a complete understanding of how these objectives will support the overall strategy and goals of the enterprise. The cost of marketing to existing and prospective clients must be justified by actual customer acquisition and retention. Without accurate, dependable information to support the proposed marketing strategy, marketing directors and professionals will find it difficult to sell the executive team on the strategy and even more difficult to sustain a successful strategy over a period of weeks, months or years.

Marketing strategy has always been at the heart of enterprise success. To succeed in any industry, the business must first understand its customers, its enterprise capabilities and capacities, market and product demographics and trends and patterns in the market in which the company is engaged. To build upon that success, the enterprise must actively work to acquire and retain customers. Every customer has a buying behavior and it is imperative that the enterprise understand that behavior if they are to encourage sales.

The marketing strategy of any organisation must be based on solid market research that clearly defines the market segment, target customer, demographic, required service levels, product and service requirements and trends and patterns in buying behavior. Without this critical feedback, no organisation can accurately plan for product offerings or marketing techniques or campaigns.

To adapt to the changing competitive and market landscape, the organisation must monitor changes in buying behavior based on demographics, geographies, psychographics and behavioral buying data. True marketing business intelligence requires a concise data mining process using data from existing enterprise data bases and systems. However, many organisations find it difficult to leverage and understand this data, because the information they need resides in disparate locations and is difficult, if not impossible, to integrate and summarize.

Today’s marketing professional needs a single view of data with the capacity to quickly and easily analyse this data, predict and forecast trends and analyse the root cause of issues before they present critical challenges to the enterprise strategy.

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