Automated BI enables real-time prioritisation of sales leads

Profile

A high-growth cloud software provider (SaaS).

Situation

A fast-growing cloud software business had developed an in-house KPI dashboard to monitor sales performance and customer success, however the process to manage and update the dashboard was manual and time-consuming. The cumbersome update process for the dashboards limited the productivity of sales team and reduced management visibility of performance.

Action

We converted existing business logic (based primarily in Excel) into automated SQL scripts in order to pull and transform in an automated, fast, and consistent way. This reduced the complexity of existing reports, allowing the level of granularity to be increased (e.g. moving from monthly to hourly metrics, enabling real-time decision making).

We also developed additional KPIs that offered deeper insight into the effectiveness of the sales team. The reports were integrated into Power BI using automated feeds from multiple sources, e.g. HubSpot CRM, ServiceNow, billing databases and Google AdWords.

Impact

The automation saved 1.5 FTE time in updating the dashboards and enabled sales leads to be prioritised in real-time, increasing response rates and ultimately driving higher conversions.

So what?

There are plenty of off-the-shelf product recommendations however these are no substitute for recommendations workflows that are intuitively based on your customer behaviours. Often one simple commercial insight (customers prefer to buy a similar colour / fit / size as their initial purchase and they struggle to find this given range changes) can be easily incorporated into a straightforward analytical solution with big effect.