Executive Summary
Effective analytics enables businesses to understand the data they’re collecting in greater volumes and more forms than ever before. The situation has special importance for sales organizations. Applied to data created and needed by sales organizations, analytics can help achieve quotas and forecast more consistently, understand the impact of incentives and maximize the potential of territories, all of which support the effort to optimize sales performance. These benefits establish the foundation for a business case to adopt analytics tools that generate information to guide actions and decision-making.
Today a new generation of digital technologies is adding more power and flexibility to sales analytics. To address the flood of data now available, big data systems for processing and storing data have evolved quickly to help sales organizations extract practical insights from masses of data. Advances in mobile technology make it possible to access analytics from smartphones and tablets, enabling users on the go to make informed decisions about what to do next. Utilizing cloud computing for sales applications and integration of data also facilitates access to and use of sales analytics. A new generation of collaborative tools enables sales teams to communicate and coordinate sales analytics with sales operations, managers and sales reps to enable them to plan and execute more effectively.