The evolving social media has changed the sales and marketing of most businesses to gain a more stable position in the market. Companies and organizations spend 10%-12% of the total revenue on marketing and sales of products and services, with B2Cs spending more than B2Bs.

Here’s how BThe Business Intelligence helps enhance the sales and marketing of the business by uncovering and providing new opportunities actionable insights on data, techniques, and strategies to them to a good extent. Business Intelligence offers a variety of features and benefits for improving sales. In this article, we are introducing Business Intelligence with three ways to improve sales and marketing of the company with fast speed and reliability.

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Understanding the Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the infrastructure comprising business analytics, data mining, data visualization, and data tools that help the organization make data-driven decisions. It is also responsible for collecting, storing, and analyzing the data from certain activities to optimize sales and marketing. Based on the present and historical data of the company, Business intelligence enables the users to make better decisions within their business context. This can also help track the market trends and generate sales, marketing, and revenue more quickly and efficiently. It provides the right and accurate data to the company to perform the data-based operation effectively. 

Here is a specific guide that can help the organization to make a smarter data-driven decision by implementing Business Intelligence:

• Analyze the ways to enhance the profit: Business intelligence offers smarter and strategic ways while performing the tasks and operations in the company that increase the net profit and help maintain the budget.
• Analyze customer behaviour:The company can easily analyze the customer’s behaviour by performing certain operations on data collected by the customer, leading to closer customer interest.
• Compare the data with a competitor: Using business intelligence to research data can help the business spot the competitor in the market; this will help the team or the leader plan the operations and project in much more innovative ways.
• Spot the issues and problems: Spotting the problems and problems seems much more challenging for the organization because it demands a much more skilled and experienced person or a separate team. However, business intelligence helps in discovering the issues with the flow of operation on any project or system easily.

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5 Key Features of Business Intelligence

If you are also in the Business Intelligence software market, it is significant to know the key business features that can help improve business planning and strategies. Due to the unique and required feature of Business Intelligence, organizations are moving towards better sales, marketing processes, and planning.

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1. Operational Reports: The operation report includes a detailed summary of the daily events, operations, and suitable information that any business executive can require to make any critical decision for the growth of the business. This operational report can be very beneficial for analyzing the productivity and efforts they made daily and is enough for the intended project or to keep the workflow balanced. 
2. Executive Dashboards: It provides the results and overview of your business in the interactive form of charts, graphs, summaries, and other information reports. After having an overview, it’s becoming very reliable for the business’s executive to opt for the strategies better and set the plan of action. These Executive dashboards include the organization leader’s real-time data, graphical representation, and statistics.
3. Open Integration: Business Intelligence can drive valuable data except for the organization’s data, including data from emails, social media platforms, websites, and from many more platforms where your organization is active. It provides the data integration from different resources under the same roof for combining the diverse form of information into an actionable and useful report. 
4. Pivot Tables: The pivot tables are the essential part of Business Intelligence to determine the information and uncover the hidden trends in the market for business growth. It can automatically extract the most significant features and data from one large messy dataset and present it into another table. To do so, it uses different calculations such as sorting, deleting, counting, or averaging the data stored in one table and, lastly, summarizing the response in other tables.
5. User-Specific Security: Keeping the data secure from unauthorized access plays a significant role in data security. The business intelligence tools will allow the organization to restrict the access of any certain user from accessing the data sets. This BI feature enables the user to personalize your BI applications and properties.

What are Business Intelligence Tools?

The Business Intelligence tools are like helping hands for the businesses or organization to understand your datasets’ trends and insight to make tactical and logical business decisions. It will help you acknowledge the messy and massive amount of data your business builds up. It helps analyze the data from the dynamic business environment and customer behaviour and improves the visibility of your business. These tools are in the form of software and applications used to study and process the data previously stored in a data warehouse or any other location. It enables the data manager to create manageable dashboards and generate reports.

Presenting the 5 topmost Business Intelligence Tools

1. Zoho Analytics: Zoho Analytics tool is considered one of the smartest tools of the business intelligence platform. It enables the users to develop insightful dashboards and analyze the data visually. It also provides the facility to ask its AI-powered assistant questions to get the result in a meaningful report.
2. HubSpot: HubSpot is the inbound marketing, sales, and service application that help in establishing a better connection between the leaders and the customers. The sales software of HubSpot will provide detailed insight into the prospect to automate the tasks and operations, and marketing software helps to run the complete inbound marketing campaigns.
3. Birst: This is a free exclusive SaaS business intelligence platform comprising data discovery, reporting, and analysis. It simply integrates the data from several systems and automates the data warehouse. It performs a faster decision process than other traditional BI frameworks, and the Hadoop architecture offers high-concurrency analytics.
4. SAS: It supports centralized metadata, data visualization, governance, and scalability. It is used to establish the high connection between the various data sources and the end-user. It provides the availability of the right and suitable information to the legitimate user at the right time. The SAS tools make the data secure from the security issue identification and resolution. Explore SAS Business Intelligence Platform Overview for more information.
5. MicroStrategy: The tool provides data-driven for every organization queries promptly. It includes the data mining and visualization of data for web-based deployment in the business. The MicroSErvice helps enhance productivity and facilitates cloud support via Amazon Web Services.

Execution of Successful Business Intelligence strategies

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Just implementing the business intelligence is not enough to successfully drive the business to the expected position. The proper execution of the BI strategies to meet the expectations from the BI and take advantage of its exclusive features and tools is essential. The successful strategy of BI will require a strong organization to determine that the data is used smartly from the initial stage to the final. So here, we cover up certain execution phases of the BI strategies.

• Data collection: It makes Business Intelligence start its work. Before proceeding any operation, the business needs to recognize where they can collect the data of the visitors and customer and adequately organize it into the data that can be analyzed later on based on the organization’s requirements. Without collecting the data, no operation can be successfully performed in any organization.
• Data storage: Data storage is now becoming a challenge for organizations to proceed with the massive amount of data of the customers. And to be useful, the data should be stored at such a location so that the data stakeholder can efficiently access the data. Its location can be in an SQL database, etc. most importantly, the stored data should be up-to-date, so the user organization can modify it or perform any action quickly.
• Data Analysis: Behind the successful completion of every project or mission, data analysis plays every role. It is the core of business intelligence to extract useful data from the dataset and present it in the report. It focuses on the descriptive and diagnostic analytics for several organization questions like where the organization has been, where it is now, and where it can be.
• Data Reporting: All the analyzed data will be of no use until and unless the strategies do not provide and report or result based on it. Data reporting is important to reach a specific decision and convey the insight to use it to drive profit from Business Intelligence.

3 ways Business intelligence can improve your sales and marketing effect

The business’s marketing and sales are a major reason for the revenue margin and its customer engagement in the existing market. And to analyze the sales and marketing of the business, business intelligence provides business analytics, data virtualization, data mining, and many more data tools. Better marketing and sales initiatives will be effective in the long run of the business. So to better transform the sales and marketing of the business, here are three ways business intelligence can help.

1. Determine and focus on the higher-profit customers: The targeted customer of any business should be the one who can drive profit to your business. It can be someone who places bigger orders in a good amount. The Business Intelligence software and tools can help you rank the customers based on their frequency and value of the purchase. This enables the business to analyze the best customers better and build a suitable profile to focus your marketing efforts and strategies to land a big fish for the business’s profit.
2. Enhance the accuracy rate of sales forecast: In the industry studies, it is found that the improvement in forecast accuracy results in better order fill rates, reduced inventory levels, and higher profit margins. Using the insights leveraged by the Business Intelligence software, the marketing and sales team can improve the sales forecast by accommodating the seasonal demand, product promotions, slow-moving items, and much more. Business intelligence provides ease in predicting the burden by giving detailed sales history information to support the underlying analysis. By accessing and analyzing the detailed history of sales and marketing, the data stakeholder or the sales team can quickly reach accurate and suitable inventory decisions and procurements.
3. Measure the effect of your marketing programs and campaigns: With the help of business intelligence software, you can easily monitor, analyze and plan the success of promotional programs or the campaign’s activities to watch what marketing promotion your customers are reacting best. By using the analyzed data from the business intelligence system, you can undoubtedly maximize the revenue returned from every marketing campaign. You can optimize the sales and marketing process by better identifying the opportunity to enhance growth and sales.

Conclusion

The business intelligence is implemented in the organization the enables the users to create intuitive reports. An increasing number of businesses are adopting business intelligence to improve and manage their company’s sales. This business intelligence application is continuously increasing in the competitive world due to its excellent function of statistical analysis, business performance analysis, benchmarking, DSS (Decision Support System), Forecasting reports and prediction, etc. It helps in effective decision making. Before the implementation of Business intelligence in the organization or company, it was very challenging to determine the needs and requirements of the customer, which affects the sales and revenue margin.