Business Intelligence By Role
Discover how a business intelligence platform can enhance your specific role within an organization.
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Business Intelligence for C-Suite
As the head of a company or department, those with C-Suite titles are responsible for making tough decisions and being prepared for the unexpected. You must be the eyes and ears of the organization.
When it comes to companies specializing in services, high-level key performance indicators (KPIs) such as billable ratio (billable hours divided by available hours) and daily revenue (time entries multiplied by hourly rate) are vital elements within an organization that must be considered and analyzed.
In order to truly understand how to manage employee projects, client demands, all while keeping a third-eye on the monthly budget, each leader requires reports that are not only historical, but also predictive in nature. Only then will you be able to decipher the data and prepare for future growth.
Whether you’re leading finance, technology, or operations, a tool like business intelligence will change the way you perceive and analyze data. It will lead you on the right path to improving your business operations as well as keeping track of your teams’ performances and strengths.
Business Intelligence for Finance
The focal point of any service-based company is the employees. The budget of projects, time entries, and expense reports can cause headaches, especially when the number of employees exceeds 75.
Any financial expert knows that being in the green equals success and to maintain a steady level of revenue requires keeping up-to-date with numerical data across the board.
Making sure expense reports are filed by month end, understanding project-profitability (is a certain project costing the company more than the rate a client is paying?) and tracking employees’ billable hours are just not viable tasks when done manually or through multiple systems.
Business intelligence solutions can cut the time in half when it comes to handling finances within a company. Instead of exporting and importing data, the financial department has access to a massive data warehouse where they are able to manipulate data and be in full control of time entry reports as well as project profitability.
Not to mention, a stress-free tax season.
Business Intelligence for Sales
When it comes to sales within the business-to-business (B2B) world, a sales cycle is, well, a long and windy road, with many speed bumps.
Most opportunities start from a lead and then nurture into a prospect, and if you’re lucky, become a client. However, as most Business Development Executives (BDEs) know, not all leads become prospects and not all prospects are client ready.
The key lies within knowing how many of these leads that come in on a daily basis are qualified enough to be classified as potential customers as well as which of these leads will eventually lead to bookings and revenue.
So, how does the sales department know whether they are heading in the right direction? If they’re able to find the correlation between leads, bookings, and revenue, they will have an understanding of how much outreach to generate per week based on this data. This crucial information is all visualized within a sophisticated BI platform.
A complex BI tool will provide analysis into how much profit each prospect will bring in, how each BDE is doing in terms of revenue and bookings, and can even disclose precise data on business size versus revenue - is it better to work with one large organization or many smaller corporations?
Business Intelligence for Customer Success
Each department within a company plays a fundamental role in keeping the company alive, but quite honestly, without clients it’s rather impossible to survive.
Renewal rates, customer retention, upsells, and client growth are just a few aspects that Account Executives must manage for each of their clients. Each relationship must be personalized to avoid customer churn, which is detrimental to a company’s health. Who is up for renewal? Who requires customized solutions?
Who is upscaling and requires extensive growth results? It’s a lot of customer data to manage and unfortunately is still done in a manual, labor-intensive way.
Keeping up with appearances is not conceited, it’s good customer service, and with an analytics platform like BI it will fix any errors that have fallen through the cracks. Automation, annual recurring revenue (ARR), and blended data are available with business intelligence, and will ensure customer satisfaction for years to come.
Business Intelligence for Product Teams
A product is either tangible or intangible.
That being said, profitability is the same for both as each case relies on market share, volume, and quantity sold. Supply and demand are critical components when dealing with a product as it’s never ideal to have too much supply and not enough demand, or the opposite, not enough supply and high demand.
This is the case with an intangible product as well, instead of inventory management, the focus is on project and employee management.
Enter business intelligence. Extremely useful for product teams as it will forecast trends based on historical and current data to determine business decisions based on when to buy inventory, what is most likely to have the highest demand, and who is buying.
These insights will enforce a stable supply and demand chain, helping you to avoid over-buying and under-selling. You will also be in full control of your ARR and be able to predict revenue for the next 1, 2, and 3 years.
Business Intelligence for Marketing
A strong marketer could easily transition to a career as a psychic. Both must foresee the future and provide insight into what is yet to come.
In order to build a strategic marketing plan, marketers are required to know the trends before they’re mainstream. To be ahead of the curve is what drives the success of a business. The big question is, how can this be done?
Relying on leads, campaigns, and design isn’t wrong, but knowing exactly who to target, what they want, and where they are is a whole other ball game. Full control over reports and data is what a marketing department must have to be at the forefront of any strategic plan.
Let’s return to the big “how” question: how to put your organization ahead of the curve? A business intelligence product will give you practical information about past lead and campaign data to help you figure out how to move forward.
Stored within a data warehouse, your crucial data will be easily visualized and analyzed to prepare you for important marketing decisions, techniques to get better marketing-qualified leads, and therefore, results leading to a strong marketing campaign.
Business Intelligence for Information Technology (IT)
While it may not always be seen as the most profitable department in an organization, the Information Technology (IT) team is certainly one of the most valuable. Its day-to-day consists of activities that are vital to the continued efficiency and security of the company’s business activities and employees.
IT is the one team whose “busy period” isn’t just month- or quarter-end, it’s all year round. From onboarding recently-hired employees and setting up new clients to managing office equipment (on a budget!); this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The IT department is also responsible for important organizational projects, such as implementing a new internal CRM, for example. IT would lead this project, tracking its progress and success while staying within budget - which they’re allocated each year based on past performance and projections.
With all these tasks, it's no wonder an IT department can become swamped with calls and requests. A tool like BI can help automate certain processes and provide top-level dashboards to facilitate their daily operations.
Depending on the size of your organization and their calendar year, the IT team is in a constant state of motion that requires them to remain as efficient as possible at all times.