Utilizing Business Intelligence For Sales And Marketing (A Full Guide)
Struggling with sales? Learn how our business intelligence for sales and marketing software can help and uncover insights to boost revenue.
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Imagine you're in charge of sales for your company. You’ve got a solid team and a decent product, but you're coming up short on your revenue targets month after month. You can’t quite pinpoint why you're struggling, but you suspect it has something to do with your approach to sales. Business intelligence for sales and marketing can give you the insights you need to uncover your problems and get your sales back on track. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how sales intelligence tools help sales and marketing teams do precisely that by uncovering actionable insights to boost revenue.
Aomni’s solution, sales intelligence software, can help your team better understand your sales processes and identify any issues that may be affecting performance. This business intelligence for sales and marketing tool will help you uncover actionable insights to help your team get back on track.
What Is Business Intelligence?
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Business intelligence (BI) refers to integrating business analytics, data mining, visualization, and data tools to support organizations in making data-driven decisions.
BI gives companies a comprehensive view of their data, enabling them to:
- Drive change
- Eliminate inefficiencies
- Respond quickly to shifts in the market or supply chain
Modern BI solutions emphasize self-service analysis, governed data on trusted platforms, and rapid insights, empowering business users to make faster, informed decisions.
Why Business Intelligence Matters
With the rise of the data analytics industry, businesses are increasingly relying on advanced BI tools to:
- Collect
- Interpret
- Act on data more effectively
Trends like adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics are helping companies manage risks and make better decisions.
Global Market Growth
The significance of BI is underscored by the expected growth of the global business data and analytics market, which is projected to reach approximately $684 billion by 2030. This illustrates BI's importance in driving business success in today’s data-driven landscape.
Why Is Business Intelligence Important
Sales intelligence tools help companies make better and faster decisions. They analyze sales data and provide actionable insights that improve sales performance. Research shows that more than 60% of businesses don’t have a structured approach to sales. This lack of organization often leads to the following:
- Ineffective sales processes
- Wasted resources
- Missed opportunities
Sales intelligence tools help companies organize by providing structure and uncovering hidden areas of improvement. They analyze historical data to produce detailed reports that reveal what’s working in your sales processes and what’s not. This helps you:
- Get organized
- Make better decisions
- Improve sales performance
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Benefits of Business Intelligence For Marketing
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Better sales intelligence means more data and clearer insights to inform your decisions and strategies. A smart BI process reduces the amount of guesswork and reliance on information, processes, and beliefs that may need to be updated.
With business analytics for marketing, you can ensure that your decisions are based on up-to-date information and create better-informed, data-backed strategies.
Identify Trends, Problems, and Opportunities with Business Intelligence
Business intelligence gives you greater visibility into your marketing campaigns, helping you to spot:
- Potential problems
- Opportunities for improvement
Using business analytics for marketing, you can continually improve your campaigns. BI can also help you uncover trends within your:
- Business
- Industry
Leverage Market Trends
You can then take advantage of these trends to improve your marketing and position your company better in your market.
Improve Efficiency with Business Intelligence
With business intelligence, you can also detect inefficiencies within your internal processes. As you uncover and correct more of these inefficiencies, you’ll get more done, improving the results of your marketing campaigns.
Increase Competitiveness with Business Intelligence
Some of your competitors are using business intelligence. Investing in BI can help you keep up with the competition and surpass them as you uncover opportunities they aren’t aware of yet.
Drive Revenue Growth with Business Intelligence
Ultimately, business intelligence helps you:
- Reach your business goals
- Drive more revenue
As you make better decisions and continually improve your processes, you’ll see improved results from your marketing.
Benefits Of Business Intelligence For Sales
Accurate sales forecasts provide many benefits, such as increased order fulfillment, lower inventory costs, and higher profits. Business intelligence improves the speed and accuracy of sales forecasts by using adjacent information based on:
- Product demands
- Promotional campaigns
- Other factors
The analysis of sales history data can improve forecast accuracy, leading to more:
- Timely procurements
- Future revenue forecasting
- Efficient inventory management
Optimize Your Promotional Campaigns
With the integration of sales-based business intelligence, product companies can maximize revenue by maximizing every penny spent on advertising and marketing.
Business intelligence tools allow organizations to precisely measure how customers are responding to their sales promotional campaigns, motivating decision-making to allocate additional resources to the most effective campaigns.
Build on Preexisting Sales
Building on preexisting sales through customer retention is more cost-effective and profitable for eCommerce businesses than acquiring and selling to new customers. Business intelligence tools can help sales professionals track what existing customers buy or don’t buy.
Salespeople equipped with this information can target retained customers with:
- Specific sales opportunities
Unify Sales Data to Your Benefit
Sales teams depend on cross-functional data from CRMs, customer support, and marketing teams to provide a holistic sales experience to customers. Business intelligence can improve sales by importing datasets from:
- Spreadsheets
- Excel
- CRM
- Call center apps
These datasets provide an in-depth analysis of closing deals and customer service quality
Real-Time Data Extraction
One of the significant advantages of BI tools is they extract data from third-party applications in real-time, avoiding the pitfalls of importing static data across systems.
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How Business Intelligence Applies In Sales And Marketing
Business Intelligence (BI) tools play a crucial role in helping businesses enhance their websites for better conversion rates. Businesses can make data-driven adjustments to improve user experience by analyzing how users interact with various elements like:
- Layout
- Keywords
- Meta tags
BI tools can help identify which product descriptions or call-to-action buttons work best, making it easier to refine your site for higher engagement and conversion. Usability testing, paired with BI insights, enables businesses to create websites that look good and effectively turn visitors into customers.
Identifying and Targeting the Right Audience
BI in marketing offers unparalleled precision in identifying and targeting the right audience segments. It tracks user behavior across digital platforms, continuously refining customer profiles based on:
- Interaction history
- Preferences
This enables businesses to create highly targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with their audience. By leveraging BI tools, businesses can ensure that their marketing efforts are reaching the right people and delivering personalized content that drives higher engagement.
Measuring Marketing Performance
Business Intelligence provides detailed insights into the performance of marketing campaigns. BI tools help marketers assess what’s working and what’s not with real-time data on metrics like:
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Engagement levels
Feedback Loop Optimization
This feedback loop enables A/B testing to determine the most influential variables, while financial analysis helps identify cost-efficient strategies. As a result, businesses can focus their resources on marketing tactics that generate the most revenue, ensuring their efforts are always aligned with their goals.
Personalizing Marketing Across Channels
Personalization is essential for effective marketing, and BI enables businesses to achieve this across multiple channels. BI tools help marketers map out the customer journey with precision by stitching together data from various touchpoints such as:
- Social media
- Mobile
If a customer clicks on a Facebook ad but doesn’t complete a purchase, BI tools can trigger personalized email campaigns based on that interaction. This level of personalization directly impacts sales, with 91% of consumers more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations.
Calculating Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Understanding Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is crucial for determining which customers are most valuable to your business. BI tools aggregate data from sales, customer interactions, and engagement metrics to create a complete picture of each client’s value.
This enables businesses to focus their marketing efforts on high-value customers, increasing profitability. BI tools also forecast future purchasing behavior, helping businesses identify potential top spenders early in their lifecycle ensuring marketing resources are directed toward the most promising segments.
Assisting Product Development
BI doesn’t just apply to sales and marketing. It also informs product development. BI tools help businesses determine which product features are in demand and what improvements need to be made by analyzing:
- User feedback
- Market trends
This data-driven approach ensures product development aligns with customer needs and market trends, giving businesses a competitive edge.
Empowering Self-Service and Custom Reporting
One of the greatest advantages of BI tools is their ability to empower marketing and sales teams through self-service reporting.
With drag-and-drop interfaces and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, non-technical users can quickly generate reports and insights without IT assistance. This enables faster decision-making and allows teams to focus on optimizing their strategies based on real-time data.
Ensuring Data Security and Compliance
Data security is a top concern for businesses, and BI tools have robust security features to safeguard sensitive information. From user permission controls to data encryption, BI tools help businesses comply with data protection regulations while preventing:
- Breaches
- Fraud
These tools can audit user activity to detect suspicious behavior, ensuring that customer data remains secure.
11 Business Intelligence Tools For Sales And Marketing
1. Aomni: Pioneering for Sales Intelligence Tools
Aomni is a sales intelligence software that revolutionizes B2B sales operations. The platform leverages AI to provide data-driven insights for account-based sales and marketing strategies, optimizing every stage of the process from research to execution.
2. HubSpot Marketing Hub: All-in-One Solution for Sales and Marketing
HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing tool that assists businesses in attracting visitors, converting leads, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Dashboards and reporting are one of Hubspot’s product branches, and they are designed to empower teams with accessible analytics.
It allows for the integration of CRM data with:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Service data, creating a unified source for insightful reports
Streamlined Data Management
This tool aims to streamline data management, offering pre-built dashboard templates and customization options for varied business needs. It enhances data-driven decision-making across the organization.
3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence: A Customizable Sales Intelligence Tool
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence is a powerful analytics tool for understanding customer behavior and optimizing campaign performance. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence is akin to a Lego set, offering a suite of components and add-ons that can be customized to meet diverse marketing needs.
It handles data import and management by aggregating information from various sources through API connectors and file uploads, creating continuous data streams rich in metadata. The platform enables BI specialists to use data harmonization tools to unify, enrich, and validate data.
Streamlined Data Management
Salesforce provides a highly customizable CRM platform encompassing sales, customer service, marketing automation, and analytics, offering a 360-degree view of every customer.
4. Power BI: Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Tool
Power BI is a Microsoft business intelligence service that provides tools for:
- Aggregating
- Analyzing
- Visualizing
- Sharing data
Power BI is a suite of analytics tools provided by Microsoft, offering comprehensive business intelligence capabilities that allow users to:
- Connect to various platforms
- Visualize data
- Share insights
- Make informed decisions
It enables users to consolidate disparate data sets into a unified view, facilitating a comprehensive analysis landscape. This level of integration is particularly beneficial for enterprises looking to leverage data from multiple business units or platforms.
5. Google Analytics: The Go-To Tool for Website Analytics
Google Analytics is widely used in web analytics. GA tracks and reports website traffic, providing insights into:
- User behavior
- Marketing effectiveness
6. Zoho Analytics: A Self-Service Business Intelligence Tool
Zoho Analytics is great self-service BI tool for in-depth reporting and data analysis. This business intelligence tool:
- Has automatic data syncing
- Can be scheduled periodically
Integrated Data Analysis
Using the integration APIs, you can easily build a connector. You can also blend and merge data from different sources and create meaningful reports. With an easy editor, you can create personalized reports and dashboards to zoom into the important details.
It also offers a unique commenting section in the sharing options, which is great for collaboration purposes.
7. SAP Business Objects: A Business Intelligence Tool for Enterprises
SAP Business Objects is a business intelligence software that offers comprehensive reporting, analysis and interactive data visualization. The platform focuses heavily on categories such as:
- Customer Experience (CX) and CRM
- Digital supply chain
- ERP
What’s nice about this platform is the self-service, role-based dashboards it offers, enabling users to build their own:
- Dashboards
- Applications
Robust SAP Platform
SAP is robust software intended for all roles (IT, end uses, and management) and offers tons of functionalities in one platform. The complexity of the product does drive up the price, so be prepared for that.
8. MicroStrategy: An Enterprise Business Intelligence Tool
MicroStrategy is an enterprise business intelligence tool that offers:
- Powerful (and high speed) dashboarding and data analytics
- Cloud solutions
- Hyperintelligence
With this solution, users can identify trends, recognize new opportunities, improve productivity and more. Users can also connect to one or various sources, whether the incoming data is from:
- A spreadsheet
- Cloud-based
- Enterprise data software
Desktop and Mobile Access
It can be accessed from your desktop or via mobile. Setup can involve multiple parties and some rather extensive application knowledge to get started.
9. SAS Augmented Analytics & Business Intelligence
While SAS’ most popular offering is its advanced predictive analytics, it also provides a great business intelligence platform. This well-seasoned self-service tool, founded in the 1970s, allows users to leverage data and metrics to make informed decisions about their business.
Users are provided with many customization options using their APIs, and SAS ensures high-level data integration, advanced analytics, and reporting. They also have a great text analytics feature that gives you more contextual insights into your data.
10. Yellowfin BI: A Collaborative Business Intelligence Tool
Yellowfin BI is a business intelligence tool and ‘end-to-end’ analytics platform that combines visualization, machine learning, and collaboration.
Flexible Data Access
You can also easily filter through tons of data with intuitive filtering (e.g. checkboxes and radio buttons) and open up dashboards just about anywhere (thanks to this tool’s flexibility in accessibility (mobile, webpage, etc.).
The nice thing about this BI tool is that you can easily take dashboards and visualisations to the next level using a no-code/low-code development environment.
11. QlikSense: A Complete Data Analytics Platform
A product of Qlik, QlikSense is a complete data analytics platform and business intelligence tool. You can use QlikSense from any device at any time. The user interface of QlikSense is optimized for touchscreen, which makes it a viral BI tool. It offers:
- A one-of-a-kind associative analytics engine
- Sophisticated AI
- High-performance cloud platform, making it all the more attractive
An interesting feature of this platform is its Search & Conversational Analytics, which enables a faster and easier way to ask questions and discover new insights through natural language.
Overcoming Common Challenges With Business Intelligence Adoption
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Data quality problems can be a massive roadblock for organizations adopting business intelligence (BI). When businesses aren’t using real-time data from a centralized source, their BI tools often pull outdated information from disconnected systems.
This leads to inaccurate analyses that can steer decision-makers in the wrong direction. To address data quality problems, organizations should:
- Implement data governance.
- Establish clear rules for data management that align with business goals
- Assign data stewards to monitor quality
Data Quality Assurance
Enhance data validation. Include quality checks in your data pipeline to catch issues before they spread. Keep a detailed record of the data's journey to ensure transparency. Create a culture of quality. Train employees on the importance of data quality and link their performance to quality-related goals.
This helps embed accountability across the organization. Use standardized reports. Create a set of reusable, standardized templates for reporting and data visualization. This not only ensures consistency but also helps maintain control over data access.
Cultivating a Business Intelligence Culture
Getting employees to embrace BI tools can be a challenge. Change management missteps can lead to underutilization of these tools. Some strategies to boost adoption include:
- Share success stories.
- To motivate departments to engage with BI tools more actively
- Showcase how BI has improved outcomes, like boosting sales or refining marketing strategies.
Publicizing these achievements can inspire other teams to adopt BI and leverage its full potential.
5 Marketing And Sales Business Intelligence Integration Best Practices
1. Start with Clear Objectives: Set Goals for Sales and Marketing Intelligence Before Integrating Business Intelligence Tools
Integrating sales and marketing business intelligence tools is challenging. To ease the process, start with clear objectives. Define what you want to achieve with sales and marketing business intelligence.
Do you want to improve lead quality, increase sales, or learn more about customers? Setting specific goals will help you measure progress during the integration process.
2. Ensure Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Unite Marketing and Sales for Better Business Intelligence
Marketing and sales intelligence impact various parts of the organization. So, ensuring collaboration between departments is crucial when integrating business intelligence tools. This fosters:
- A unified approach to data collection
- Analysis
- Utilization
It also helps break down silos that can hinder your ability to get actionable insights from business intelligence.
3. Choose Tools That Integrate Well: Find Compatible Sales and Marketing Business Intelligence Tools
Not all sales and marketing business intelligence tools are the same. Some are more compatible with each other than others. Choose BI tools that seamlessly connect with your current tech stack to make the integration process easier.
Some tools effortlessly integrate with widely used CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and data analytics tools, cutting down on learning time and setup.
4. Provide Training and Support: Help Your Team Learn New Business Intelligence Tools
Integrating sales and marketing business intelligence tools is a big undertaking. Once you complete the process, there will still be work to do. Your team will need to learn how to use the new tools to get actionable insights that can help improve business performance.
To boost their adoption of sales and marketing business intelligence tools, provide training and ongoing support. This can include:
- Training sessions
- Tutorials
- A point person for answering questions
5. Iterate and Improve: Monitor Business Intelligence Tools Over Time and Make Adjustments as Needed
Integration isn’t a one-time event but an ongoing process. Once you integrate sales and marketing business intelligence tools, monitoring their performance over time is essential.
To ensure that the tools are meeting your business needs:
- Continuously gather feedback from users
- Analyze usage data
- Make necessary adjustments
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Try Our Sales Intelligence Software for Free Today
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted account-based sales/marketing campaign execution tool
AI-Powered Sales Enablement for Better Results
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to the following:
- Larger deal closures
- Increased promotion opportunities
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to:
- Elevate their performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Try Aomni Today
Our platform transforms the way B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction:
- Fully prepared
- Strategically positioned for success
Our platform transforms how B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction fully prepared and strategically positioned for success.
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
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