So Much SaaS, But Not So Much Collaboration

There’s a lot of SaaS going on.

According to tech journalist Barry Levine, business employees use an average of eight SaaS applications regularly. Companies with up to 50 employees work with about 40 SaaS applications. And those with 1000+ employees have over 200 in use.

Business spending on SaaS applications started to boom in 2014. By 2019, the average mid-sized enterprise spent about $343,000 annually on SaaS applications.

The most popular SaaS applications include ServiceNow, Shopify, Slack, Dropbox, MailChimp, and SurveyMonkey, according to G2Crowd and HubSpot, but there are many, many others. Here’s a look at the categories that the top 50 SaaS apps fall into. The numbers indicate how many are in that category. Most companies use one app from each group:

• Cloud Storage – 3
• Collaboration – 7
• CRM – 8
• Financial – 5
• HRM – 3
• Marketing and customer outreach – 8
• Project Management – 4
• Resource Scheduling – 2
• Security – 3
• Other – 7

But something’s missing

Alongside these categories of SaaS products, there is nothing that unifies them; there is nothing that allows the business to view activity under a single pane of glass. While it is true that most SaaS solutions have integrated reporting, and some have dashboards and visualizations, the result is that the business user still needs to pull multiple reports from multiple systems to get the data they’re looking for.

An organization that relies on heavily-siloed reporting misses opportunities to understand the dynamics of how their entire business ecosystem impacts the company KPIs.

Having a tool suite that includes reporting, dashboard, and data visualization and that can connect to any data from every SaaS system would afford them much more efficient, focused, and effective KPI management. Companies that lean on a complete reporting and dashboard tool enjoy being more agile, proactive, and responsive to trends, business objectives, and events in real-time.

Combine your data to be in control

Here is an example of how combining data from multiple systems can significantly increase a company’s ability to proactively correct courses when necessary.

Acme, Inc. uses a dashboard and reporting tool to connect with all of their SaaS products. They have a new hire class starting soon, and because they have all of their SaaS products connected, their New Hire Progress dashboard provides the CEO or sales manager or HR with what they need to know, whenever they want to know it.

The data they seek can be viewed in real-time, from a single dashboard, and by anyone they choose, on any device, including

• When every PC has been ordered and/or provisioned
• When each employee’s paperwork has been completed
• Training resources, including rooms and people, have been scheduled
• Employee rankings
• A drill-down view of the employee’s completion of courses and scores
• Feedback from each new employee about the trainer and the lesson

This collaboration of data gives Acme executives and managers unprecedented control and greater insight into the performance of nearly every aspect of their business.

Create a single version of the truth

If you are not connecting all of your SaaS tools to a single reporting system, you are not getting the full picture. Instead, you only get partial glimpses and snapshots that are disjointed and fail to connect the dots for you.

And SaaS tools that do have a reporting module don’t have all the data you need for effective decision-making.

Put the data behind your SaaS apps to work. Go beyond the canned reports. Blend your data to give you the bigger picture that drives success.

If you could see the happiness of your customers, their lifetime value, the cost to manage them, any open orders or issues, and how much money you make from them, all from one single elegant dashboard, you would love it.

ClicData will change your life!

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• Connect data from any data source
• Automate data refreshes
• Create unlimited, custom and self-updated dashboards
• Share dynamic dashboards and real-time data with our LiveLink

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