May 30, 2019
TDWI routinely sees that organizations can achieve measurable impact and value with analytics. Businesses are analyzing data to better understand customers and improve operational efficiencies, among other use cases. The use of analytics to improve sales processes and outcomes should be no exception, yet TDWI research indicates that sales often ranks below other parts of the business, such as operations and marketing, in terms of its ability to use data and analytics to drive decisions.
Just as other parts of the organization are analyzing increasing amounts of disparate data, sales should be, too. Typically, organizations have used metrics to help guide the sales process and have built systems to track and analyze performance of core KPIs. Often, the results of these metrics are displayed on an interactive dashboard.
Although metrics and KPIs are important, they are only the first step to becoming a more analytics-driven sales organization. This Insight Accelerator report explains why self-service analytics and more advanced analytics such as PA/ML (predictive analytics/machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing) can and should be used to help strategically manage the B2B sales pipeline and inform the sales process.