Customer Reporting Becomes Powerful When Automated

I often tell my salespeople, along with my partners throughout the world, never confuse activity with productivity, and yet we all do it anyway, and here is why. There is an inherent need to understand the actions that create productivity and, in this case, that productivity is bottom-line sales.

ClicData has a significant number of clients who manage Sales KPIs using Business Intelligence. In an earlier blog post, I noted that there are several KPIs that every sales leadership team utilizes and many more that go beyond the standard pipeline, dials, talk time, quotes, proposals, cost of sales, etc. 

However, what if your business model is to actually produce the activities that lead to sales? What if your company was one that people looked to for accelerated sales activity and you were being paid to do just that, produce activities that lead to sales? 

A customer spotlight on performance reporting

As a Business Intelligence and Dashboarding company, ClicData changes the way businesses spend their time with data, KPIs, and performance management in general. I want to share a bit about one of our customers’ story, that leverages ClicData to improve the way KPIs are seen and more importantly, consumed.

They are a sales acceleration as a service company that is powered by artificial intelligence.

What this means is the within their secret sauce lies the ability to deliver three years of sales activities in 3 months. They’re delivering 30,000+ sales activities (15,000+ dials, 12,000+ personalized emails, and 3,000+ social selling activities) over three months. 

Their customers are paying them to produce activities that produce results (sales).   

So, why did they need a flexible dashboard and business intelligence solution? The answer is accountability.

The reason successful organizations embrace real-time KPI measurement is that they welcome accountability.

They understood that measuring the KPIs promised and having an “any time” performance report available, ensures that their customers are never in the dark. It also shows that they welcome accountability, and thus, always ensure performance against what was committed (an under-promise, over-commit sort of thing).

Customer reporting: How to go from days to seconds

As you can imagine, putting together reports that chronicle the historical performance, against a set of commitments, that involves multiple systems and tens of thousands of data points would be extremely time-consuming.

Extracting data from telephony, marketing platforms, social media, and email on a daily basis, then blending that data and finally plotting all of that into an application, such as Excel, took all day and consumed a full-time headcount.

A lot of the time, the best that could be accomplished was a weekly summary report of KPI performance. By using a flexible platform such as ClicData, our customer is able to connect once to their business systems and deliver dashboards via live links for each customer and each campaign, allowing their customers to see progress against committed KPIs at any time.

Their Director of Operations was the first to realize the massive benefits of not having to rely on Excel for their reporting. ClicData made the data merge from multiple sources a lot easier. They appreciated the power, flexibility, and white-label option for their customer reporting.

Automation is the key

Automation is the key in turning the drudgery of a basic Excel report, which was elementary at best, into a machine that keeps up with the speed of their sales activity engine.

They are now able to do more with fewer resources, provide more custom reporting, and speak from a universal version of the truth between them and their clients.

As an aggregator of best-of-breed sales AI and sales acceleration solutions, they chose ClicData for the ability to present a single dashboard for their customers so that they can see the progress and trends of the activities, meetings, and pipeline they created for them.

The power of ClicData for more productive sales teams

ClicData allows a sales AI and sales acceleration company to focus on their clients and commitments and not on creating reporting. The power and flexibility of ClicData provide an automated way to deliver a live, dynamic, and uniform business intelligence solution via real-time reporting and KPI visualization.  

Productivity is always the ultimate goal, KPIs measure the activity required to meet those goals and flexible business intelligence is how you measure the activities required which lead to success. 

If you are spending time manually extracting data, producing one-off reports and not embracing the power of automation, you are already behind the companies who are, and your spending more to produce less actionable insights into the activities that are producing the results your company requires.

But you can still elevate your game and adopt a fully-automated, 100% cloud-based, and intuitive Business Intelligence solution to help your sales teams get more done. Discover ClicData for Sales teams.