Advantages of Business Intelligence

A good business intelligence tool can collect data from different sources, combine the relevant information, and present it to the management. Reports coming out of CRM, ERP, SFA, or a point of sale tool is not enterprise business intelligence, sure there can be some intelligence built into reporting, but these reports work in silos and reports are incomplete. For management, to make decision they need all the information consolidated in front of them. For making a good informed decision - data may come from various different sources CRM, ERP, POS, SFA, etc. This is where enterprise business intelligence comes into play.

The main advantages of business intelligence are:

• Creates intelligence out of available data.

Looking at transactional data may not reveal much, there may be so much information in the data and business intelligence is the tool to pull all this information out. Data can tell you about the health of business, information about specific products, sales in territory, employees' performance, campaign effectiveness - possibilities are limitless.

Provides insight into current operations: Business intelligence can be very effectively used to manage company operations, e.g. looking at reports filled by field sales staff from different territories, analysis can be done on specific sales representative.

Helps in making easier and faster decision by providing various perspectives: Rather than looking for information and waiting for days to get all the facts, with Business Intelligence, all the pertinent information will be available to decision makers on their finger tips.

Works on historic records: All the historical records stored in the company's files are rarely looked at - Business Intelligence can churn out important information from past records - e.g. when did a company default on its payments or how did products sale do three years back when it rained as heavy as projected to rain this year.

Provides trend analysis: Business intelligence can look at all the historical records and can provide trend analysis, which can be a very important tool to look at the direction of the company.

Can pull data from discrete sources of data: Business intelligence can pull data from different sources and present it to the user in unified way.

Summarization, slicing & dicing, interactive dashboards with drill down, navigation and graphical presentations: This is another great advantage of business intelligence - rather than looking at all the transactions and only sums/totals. In business intelligence, user can start at a dashboard which can give summarization of key KPIs and from there user can slice & dice into which ever detail they are interested in. Here the information can also be presented in nice graphical form which can convey its meaning at first glance e.g. small things like this month's negative sales as compared to last year this month can be highlighted in red.

Reporting does not impact performance of transactional system: Business intelligence reports does not have any negative impact on transactional systems (like ERP, SFA, CRM) performance. This system works separate from transactional systems.

CRM/ERP not a must - can work on CONVENTIONAL data: Business intelligence can get information from any custom conventional data sources as well. It does not necessarily need enterprise application like ERP, CRM or SFA.

Business Intelligence

Indian Companies - What to look for in SFA

Every company Indian or non-Indian, big or small, product or service, faces similar challenges. All the companies have to manage their leads, opportunities, Mobilefield force reporting software and customers. There are some unique things to be handled by Indian companies when it comes to sales -

Ø Paper to Mobile: unlike western countries where transition has been gradual - paper to desktop to laptop/mobile/tablets, in India for most companies, transition has been directly from paper to mobile. Almost all sales agents have a mobile phone but may not have a laptop.and MRReporting software

Ø Sales processes needs to be tailored to local ask.

Ø Most companies are managed by owners-decision making is centralized.

Many Indian companies are used to doing business in traditional way using paper. They believe that SFA is not for their businesses, it is very complex and costly! Some of them feel that SFA is overkill for them and they are best served without using any technology. BusinessIntelligence This may have been true in the past, but now SFA systems make managing customers and sales very easy and efficient. If companies look for the following in their SFA, they will be able to get most out of it:

1. Ease of Use: SFA should be intuitive to work with. Ease of use should be the primary thing in SFA - how good the system is if no one uses it? SFA should help sales team to manage leads, opportunities, customers etc. It does not have to be complicated.

2. Effective Sales Process: SFA should help implement sales process defined by the company. Defining a process and sticking to it, is the key to company's success. Mobilefield force reporting software  SFA should help a company to define a process and then helpthem stick to the process.

3. Affordable: Indian market is very price sensitive. Companies should look at different models to make SFA affordable for them. For some companies user based pricing for SFA deployed on cloud may be a better option.

4. Scalable: SFA should not only support current business, but also be able to scale to future needs. Indian market is growing at a very fast rate, so SFA should be able to work for company when they are bigger in 2 years, 5 years and so on.

6. Analysis (Reports): SFA collects lot of sales data, but it is important for companies to look at this data and help make good decisions. Analysis of SFA data, in terms of reports and business intelligence, will be very helpful for Sales team and management to plan for next day, week, month, quarter and years.

7. Alerts: SFA should be able to proactively tell sales agents about the next steps - like send technical document to a prospect. Alert should also be able help management with important information.

8. Support: Most Indian companies do not have technical staff to resolve issues, handle upgrades or perform enhancements on SFA systems. Provider should be able to support SFA during stabilization phase and beyond if needed.

TenWays to Increase Sales Numbers using SFA

Sales Force Automation makes very easy to handle the complete sales process. SFA not only increases sales force efficiency and improve customer service (which it does); it improves sales numbers as well. This can be applied on all companies of any size with sales staff from fewer to hundreds and thousands, of all regions' selling product or services.

SFA can help companies to increase their sales numbers. In other words, SFA software can be used as an information system that allowsa company to deal more effectively with the process for converting prospects into purchasers in an individual way, customer by customer.

 Ten ways in which SFA can help companies to increase their sales are:

1.       Define a Sales Process: Companies can define sales process, tailored for the industry and works for them. Once the process is defined, SFA can be used to implement the process. SFA will make sure that all the leads follow theirdefined sales process and it will provide a way for management to monitor if sales process was properly followed or not.

2.       Keep Sales Team Members Informed: Using SFA, all team members in a territory will know about the prospects, sales representatives are working on. By this way, multiple sales representatives will not contact the same prospect and negatively impact the opportunity with the prospect.

3.       Keep Management Informed: Via SFA, management will know where team members are and what they are working on, which accounts/prospects are being looks at, which products, territories are targeted. SFA gives management a chance to view sales activity in almost real time and make sure it aligns with companies goals. Management can also look at sales reps load/work method and help align it.

4.       Reviews: SFA can be used to see how sales representatives are doing and let them know about it. Sales representatives' performance can be compared to their targets to see how good they are doing. Using SFA system, sales representatives and management can benchmark their performance and find areas of improvement.

5.       Management Reporting: With SFA maintained properly, sales representative will not be asked to report their daily/weekly activities separately to management - SFA will do that job. Reports can be simplified and easily obtained from SFA and letting sales team focuson sales.

6.       Work Together: SFA can help teams to collaborate and work together during the sales process - this may be especially important in working on a big account. Multiple sales representatives can work together using SFA. This will help to share their experiences, contacts, and methodology vice versa.

7.       Contact Management: SFA can help you track prospects decision tree - companies can keep information about decision makers, influencers, etc. of the prospect. SFA can help you keep track of important information about all the contacts.

8.       Alerts: SFA sends alerts to sales representatives about their important meetings during the sales cycle or on the next step or to touch base with important prospect / client if sales staff has not done so in a long time. Alerts can also be generated for middle management to let them know about progress and lackingwithin different territories across various products lines.

9.       Share Documents: SFA can be leveraged to share sales and marketing documents among the sales team. While working on a prospect, sales representatives can leverage work done by others in the team/across the team. It will save time and improve efficiency of the sales team.

10.   Mobile Applications: SFA mobile applications can be leveraged to help sales team when they are on the field. Mobile phones' GPS can be used within SFA app to generate intelligent alert and tracking etc. It can also be used as a tool for sales team to work efficiently.

Mobile field force reporting software-customized ERP- SFA and Mobile Apps

 Mobile usage is rapidly growing around the world. Users have started spending more time on non voice usage of phone. This trend has caught up throughout the world. When mobile phones came more than twenty years ago they revolutionized communication and now they are being used for another revolution.

 Companies in the last few years have used mobile applications(apps) to make inroads in the consumer market. These mobile apps are available in varying categories - games, lifestyle, social networking, productivity, news etc. With growth of social media and ability of mobile devices to add location to the products have fundamentally changed how users engage socially and the manner in which they purchase goods and services.

 Companies have started using mobile platform in enterprise segment as well. Companies are encouraging employees to bring your own device (BYOD). With BYOD, companies have to manage the security risks mobile phones poses to the enterprise data, but are outweighed by the convenience it brings to the employees. Most companies have started defining mobile strategies both for internal employees and for its consumers. Sales force automation (SFA) in one area is catching in the enterprise mobile space.

 Advanz101 mobile SFA app has been developed for sales team and field force. This app can be used to submit a daily call report (DCR), edit a DCR, and review real time data including other things. Most of these tasks were previously possible either on paper or using a laptop. Some key benefits of the app are listed below.

 Ease:  Mobile app improves operational efficiency of the complete sales team. With the app, sales team can enter a DCR using mobile from the field without having to wait for end of day or end of week to get in front of computer. This has made operational work easy for the sales rep. It also decreases errors on DCR and delays in submission of DCR. With this app sales person can even enter DCR while waiting in Doctors office.

 Reach: Mobile app increases companies reach within the sales team. Team can get proactive alerts which help them in multiple ways. With sales team all over the field it gets difficult to communicate across to multiple sales representatives at the same time.  Using mobile app company can reach out to all the sales rep or a set of sales rep whenever they want to - this gives them flexibility with mass communications within the organization. Important announcement, product related info, territory information etc can be sent to this app so that when user logs in they will have visibility.

History: App can be used to check historic information. Past records can be accessed any time to give insight into history e.g. before talking to a retailer, field person can check retailer's historic transactions and be prepared for the conversation.

Real Time: For sales team, business is on the road and decisions need to be made quickly. With ability to see real time information on the go puts business on the fingertips. With mobile app users can get real time updates on orders, opportunities, customers etc. Data updated by mobile apps from the field gives middle management instant visibility on field activity of the sales team.

The way consumer apps have transformed how we access information in our day to day personal lives, business apps will transform how we conduct business. Business apps have potential of taking us away from desktops/paper and give power in our Mobile phones so that we can take care of business anywhere and anytime.

Business Intelligence- customized ERP- SFA Business analysis platform

Pharma companies have started gathering more and more information about customer relationships through Sales force automation(SFA) tools. Information is available in tools but to get something meaningful out of it may take a lot of time and effort. That’s where Business intelligence(BI) comes into picture - BI as a tool can look through all the data and come up with meaningful answers in a very short time. In this blog we have tried to cover some of the analysis that can be done on SFA data.

Sales analysis : 

Access to cumulative sales figures on a daily / weekly basis is very useful for sales team. Field force and middle management can look at sales data to see if the direction they are moving aligns with the companies goal. Sales data can give insight into :

Which sales rep are performing to meet the target
Which regions are continuously reported in the bottom 10 for the last quarter
Which head quarters contributed the most to the total sales in a territory
Which three products are our top selling products of the month in the west region
Which HQ have insufficient list of Active Doctors and Retailers.


Product analysis:

Company can slice and dice sales effort and figures to find how products are doing across geographies. It can give insight into specific products, product categories, focus products etc. Product data can be used to shape product strategy as whole and different plans for separate regions. Some of the key questions that can be answered:

Which products are forecasted to meet the target?
How many SKUs are showing de-growth
Which SKUs achieved target in the last month
List of new products that were not sampled in a region
Product is exposed to which type of Doctor Specialization

Expense analysis:
Expense has to be kept under control to keep companies profitable. Analysis on expenses is required so that it does blow out and becomes a surprise at the year end. Expense should be monitored as it takes pace, some answers that management will need for expenses are :

In which 5 areas expenses increased by more than 50% as compared to last year
How does increase in expense co-relate with sales increase
Which head quarters have good sales to expense ratio
Expense analysis by different expense categories
Product / geography specific expense analysis

Outstanding analysis:

Companies need to be on top of outstanding in the market. Business intelligence can get appropriate information to keep outstanding in balance. Key things to monitor:

Outstanding aging analysis

Cash flow v/s Sales for different regions
Top customers with pending outstanding
Outstanding for customers as compared to average monthly sales
Outstanding analysis by region

Doctors analysis

Doctors are key to every pharma companies sales plan be it for new product introductions or pushing the current products. In that regard it is important to keep a close tab on sales reps ( or medical representatives) in the field. Product detailing and product sampling metrics becomes a good way to get insight into companies interaction with doctors.

How many Class A doctors were not visited in last month even once
CRM Doctors, their coverage and feedback
What type of Doctors are covered in product detailing 
Which doctors were visited more than the required visits
How many of focus products were sampled in the last quarter

This is just the tip of iceberg, there is so much more that can be done with the data that pharma companies have. Business intelligence can give insights which will be impossible for a human eye. Moreover ease of using various reports make it very useful for Top and middle management.

MR Reporting software, fmcg software for sales, customized ERP -SFA: How to Get A Jump Start

Sales force automation (SFA) allows companies to manage business along with data and relationships associated with them. In SFA companies can store prospect, contact, account, lead and opportunity among other sales related information. The information is centralized and accessible to the sales, marketing and other teams within the company. As SFA is build around people and relationships it is very valuable for any fast growing business.

When a company starts to sell its products or services it connects with people who need its product or service. As the company grows these relationship also grows, then you have not only buyer seller relationship but multiple new relationships - there are multiple people in your company who will have relationship with multiple people in the buying company. Over time this becomes complex and you as a company would definitely like to share the relationship and interactions with others within your organization who are connecting to customers. This is where SFA can help maintain and share information with the people in your organization easily.

 To reap the benefits of SFA, companies need good data in terms of potential, existing customers and relationships. Before companies start to use SFA concerted effort should be put to get the data in SFA. Couple of ways to get this information :

 Existing Data: Most companies should already have data which can be ported into SFA. This data may be in different systems - database, excel, note sheets or employees phone/memory. This data can be scattered within the organization from various units / departments like sales, marketing, product groups to human resource or finance. Data load templates can be used to collect data from various sources so that this important information is not lost. Data entry is possible on templates and then loaded into SFA or directly on SFA so that data is ready for users whenever they get on it.

 Third Party Data: With the rise of social networking and internet lot of data is available at company's disposal which can be fed into SFA. Linkedin, facebook, twitter already have wealth of information which can be funneled into SFA as prospects and contacts. Then there are posts, blogs, discussions, articles and posts from companies, government filing information, job postings and updates on websites etc. All this data is available on the web and anyone can use this. Companies need to figure out how to extract useful information and leave junk data behind. One way to do this is by monitoring on a regular basis and feed into SFA so that it creates prospects and opportunities. Monitoring can be done automatically by web crawlers (or manually if company has time and resources) intelligently so that only relevant information is brought back into SFA.

 Starting from a clean slate and building data in SFA can be frustrating for the users - no one likes to see blank in prospect list. If companies can work to get existing data and relevant third party data within SFA it can potentially jump start sales efforts.

MR Reporting software | FMCG software for sales| customized ERP- SFA can help improve Sales

Sales force automation has come a long way from its initial days of companies maintaining lists. Indian pharma market like most overseas market is very reliant on MRs (medical reps) and their relationship with Doctors. Pharma companies’ sales are directly dependent on how
well the MRs do in the field. So its very important to keep a record for daily and weekly activities of all the MRs - that’s where daily call report(DCR) is very useful. Daily call report should be exhaustive so to capture as much detail as important on the other hand be easy to fill so that it does not take too much time to fill - this is what most MRreporting software do.

Marketing and selling in Pharma Company depends on relationship with doctor and chemists. Attention needs to be paid to the whole secondary sales channel. Gone are the days when paper based logs were the only option for companies to keep track of all on field activities. With growing complexities and intense competition companies have started leveraging technology to maintain sales channel and relationships.

With automated sales force pharma companies can keep a pulse of day to day ground activities. Using sales force Automation Company can easily target on focused product. Some products can be picked and expedited for detailing. Specific regions and micro territories can be paid extra attention.

Sales force automation is just the beginning, use of Mobile (Mobile field sales reporting software) and business intelligence solution increases the potential for pharma companies by leaps and bounds. All that may be in next few weeks!

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a expression that refers to a multiplicity of software applications which are used by association to examine their raw data. Business Intelligence as a field of regulation is made up of numerous inter-related behavior which include online logical processing, data mining, reporting and querying.

                                       

Companies make use of Business Intelligence to get better their decision creating, cut costs and to recognize new business chances by analyzing data. Chief Intelligence officeholders of companies make use of Business Intelligence to identify the business progressions which are inefficient that are prepared for re engineering.