Why Business Analytics Matters

Measuring business performance in many companies gets started in the Accounting Department, where sales, costs and profits by customer are tracked. Yet this is literally just the tip of the customer information iceberg that companies need to grow, manage and analyze to maximize their sales strategies.

For companies that are using CRM as a competitive weapon, their marketing departments are tracking not only the financial behavior of customers, but also their purchasing, comparative shopping, and preferences for substitute products to the ones being sold. Business analytics uncover these habits of the customers and gives marketers insights into how to make sales and product campaigns more relevant to prospects and customers alike.

You get the picture: successful business analytics relies on taking multiple sources of customer data and joining them together into a single, unified version of the truth. This involves taking the Sales Force Automation database that includes customer and corporate contacts, current action items and specifics of each customer's preference and joining it with contact center, marketing and other sales databases.

Integrating all these databases in many companies is challenging, but critical for the growth of their businesses. Business analytics is useful in each of these areas: Sales Force Automation, Marketing, cross-selling and up-selling customers, prospecting for new customers and keeping existing ones by finding their preferences through research and also measuring how strategies impact customer loyalty.

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