Nucleus Research Finds the Missing Business Intelligence Link in Enhanced Forecasting
New Research Shows How Enhanced Forecasting’s Unique Time-Aware Capabilities Save Money and Optimize Internal Data Insight
The continual embrace of business intelligence has inspired organizations to find and leverage additional technology in order to optimize, analyze, and predict. With the business intelligence market targeted to reach $26.88 billion USD by 2021, companies are spending more in an attempt to analyze the data that drives their business decisions.
It makes sense that 62% of businesses consider business intelligence critical to their organization. And there are few business intelligence areas more important to companies than sales because revenue analytics helps determine more than just revenue, it allows for appropriate budgeting across the organization, making it a lynchpin for other key business decisions.
But as many sales leaders will tell you, the process of getting analytics-driven answers to complex business questions needs to be done better, faster, and in real-time. And that’s why there’s a need for Enhanced Forecasting. With key sales data residing within your CRM, it’s logical to analyze that data and identify trends, issues, opportunities, and root causes automatically. Not only is it logical, but it’s the only way modern companies can deal with the volume and complexity of sales data they create. Instead of business leaders maintaining constant vigilance over hundreds of reports, KPIs, and metrics hoping they’ll notice any problem or opportunity, Enhanced Forecasting monitors the data constantly and alerts leaders when it identifies anomalies. This replaces management by perpetual attention with management by exception, greatly reducing errors and increasing scalability.
Enhanced Forecasting Bridges the Gap
Another Enhanced Forecasting innovation is time-aware insight, the missing link in an organization’s sales performance reporting. A detailed historical perspective is critical to analyzing, forecasting, and troubleshooting the revenue pipeline. But this is a blind spot for organizations—unless they have invested actively in the technology, skills, and time to gain this insight which is a highly-specialized field of analysis.
A new research brief by Nucleus Research found that this is where Enhanced Forecasting bridges the gap with direct, time-aware insights that not only improve a company’s understanding of its customers but also directly impact organizational budgets and win-rates.
Time-Aware Cost Savings and Organizational Improvements
Looking more closely at business intelligence, typical data scientists spend only about 11% of their week analyzing and conveying data insights to companies. The bulk of their time is spent on administrative tasks, collecting information, and cleansing data. To make up for this low efficiency, organizations must either invest in increased headcount for data scientists at an average US salary of $113,000, find additional software capabilities, or engage expensive outside consultants.
In contrast, Enhanced Forecasting with its out-of-the-box ETL, data model, analytics, alerts, and visualizations can increase the productivity of data scientists and save an organization upwards of $200,000 per year. In the time spent on repetitive data tasks alone, the Nucleus report conservatively estimates that E Forecasting can save up to $32,400 per year by reducing or eliminating common roadblocks that data scientists face.
Not only does Enhanced Forecasting decrease costs, it provides a true historical picture of the sales pipeline, enabling sales leaders to not only understand the current state but also understand how they got there and what is likely to happen in the future. This allows companies to transition from reactive sales models to data-driven, time-aware organizations that can pivot based on the forecasted analysis.
With additional visibility into historical sales performance down to the sales rep level, the customers surveyed by Nucleus Research “agreed that for the bottom 80 percent performers in a sales organization, this capability can be transformative for elevating these users and aligning their actions with the most successful tactics.” This organizational improvement is priceless to sales teams as it guides skills training and sales process optimization.
The Nucleus report estimates that Enhanced Forecasting can also increase win rates 5-10% within a sales team with time-aware insights related to customer behavior and deal status. These details not only help sales representatives understand their customers’ journeys but also inform the next best actions to take with their accounts.
Leveraging Your Data, Enhanced Forecasting Insights
Nucleus Research confirms Enhanced Forecasting can aid teams by increasing sales effectiveness and reducing overall cost. Enhanced Forecasting maximizes an organization’s ability to be proactive, data-driven, and “punch above their weight,” while removing the need for increased business intelligence headcount and costly software implementation time.
The succinct research brief highlights how the most important aspects of sales revenue analytics can be optimized and streamlined out-of-the-box, setting companies on a track to improve their sales organizations immediately.
Read Nucleus Research’s full report on how Enhanced Forecasting can provide time-aware business intelligence that is essential for tracking, analyzing, and forecasting performance within a sales organization.
