Sales Analytics: Leveraging the power of data for sales with Power Apps & SharePoint
Enterprises can drive better sales performance by gaining crucial insights from their existing sales data with the combination of SharePoint and Power Apps.
As sales and marketing activities, along with the teams driving them, go digital in the face of the pandemic, collaboration between remote teams and managing sales pipelines could always be simpler and more efficient. Simultaneously, ever-changing market trends and customer demands create enormous challenges for sales teams. Here, a sales analytics solution can serve as an asset to businesses and sales teams. But the efforts that go into creating these reports often end up consuming time and costs that could be spent on acquiring customers.
Finding meaningful and accurate insights from disorganized sales data can be unviable and ineffective when done manually. Sales teams face multiple obstacles in tracking processes that may lead to unproductive or inaccurate outcomes. Multitasking, miscommunication, and biased reporting between marketing and sales teams, inaccuracy of manually processed data, lost customer data for post-sale connectivity, and anonymity of participants involved in the process are a few of the major problems.
Enterprise collaboration and business process automation (BPA) tools such as SharePoint, Power BI, and Power Automate can help organizations and sales teams to build simple, automated solutions that connect seamlessly with other key business systems. Let us understand the benefits and chief factors of using process automation for sales analytics.
Integrating Power BI with Power Automate & SharePoint for a smarter approach to sales
SharePoint, Power Automate, and Power BI are three of the best-in-class pieces of software offered by Microsoft. Each of these tools serves a unique purpose to enhance the performance of workflows and data management in an organization. A combination of the three is relevant for companies looking for a powerful and sustainable solution to create automated business process architecture. Let us understand the principal strengths of each software and how it can be leveraged successfully for sales management and sales analytics.
SharePoint is a collaborative web-based platform that serves various capabilities. Its utility increases with each level of configuration and connections to other Microsoft or third-party platforms. Hence, it works as a data management and enterprise content management system, personal cloud, intranet portal, custom web application, and collaborative software, among other uses.
Power Automate is an online service tool that allows users to synchronize and integrate all the Microsoft applications through automation as the tool’s name suggests. It also enables better functional flow, inter-connectivity of multiple software, and automated flow of conventional business processes, using around 300 predefined, in-built connectors.
Power BI is a tool that creates business intelligence reports with several interactive visualization options to make analytical reports easier to read and interpret. It works well with a wide range of data sets derived from different sources to classify, segregate, and perform comparative analyses. It also builds visual representations for insights derived from this collected data with the ability to create very detailed classifications of different categories of data to provide actionable suggestions to business leaders on both strategic and tactical levels.
The synergy of these three tools is key to cracking the code to digital collaboration in enterprises and empowering crucial business functions like sales and marketing with the ability to drive more successful outcomes.
How process automation simplifies sales management
SharePoint, Power Automate, and Power BI are three of the best-in-class pieces of software offered by Microsoft. Each of these tools serves a unique purpose to enhance the performance of workflows and data management in an organization. A combination of the three is relevant for companies looking for a powerful and sustainable solution to create automated business process architecture. Let us understand the principal strengths of each software and how it can be leveraged successfully for sales management and sales analytics.
SharePoint is a collaborative web-based platform that serves various capabilities. Its utility increases with each level of configuration and connections to other Microsoft or third-party platforms. Hence, it works as a data management and enterprise content management system, personal cloud, intranet portal, custom web application, and collaborative software, among other uses.
Power Automate is an online service tool that allows users to synchronize and integrate all the Microsoft applications through automation as the tool’s name suggests. It also enables better functional flow, inter-connectivity of multiple software, and automated flow of conventional business processes, using around 300 predefined, in-built connectors.
Power BI is a tool that creates business intelligence reports with several interactive visualization options to make analytical reports easier to read and interpret. It works well with a wide range of data sets derived from different sources to classify, segregate, and perform comparative analyses. It also builds visual representations for insights derived from this collected data with the ability to create very detailed classifications of different categories of data to provide actionable suggestions to business leaders on both strategic and tactical levels.
The synergy of these three tools is key to cracking the code to digital collaboration in enterprises and empowering crucial business functions like sales and marketing with the ability to drive more successful outcomes.
How process automation simplifies sales management
Automation and sales analytics not only reduce the overall workload for sales teams, but also equip them with tools to perform their tasks faster and with much fewer errors. By delegating the analytical and data-heavy functions to an automated tool, salespersons can add greater accuracy and valuable insights from the available data to sales activities. Here are a few obvious ways that explain how sales automation benefits teams:
- Empowers sales teams to better utilize available resources:
The availability of process automation tools enables salespersons to work with existing data and reports more effectively since they can view the relevant content from documents in a few clicks, instead of parsing through several rows and columns of data to find critical, time-sensitive information. - Helps employees leverage a well-developed collaboration experience:
With the help of Power Apps, sales teams can streamline the flow of information from one source or team member to another and by creating a well-integrated collaboration experience. The content and project management capabilities of these tools help engage all team members and ensure the visibility of the right information to the right person at the right time, For instance, once a salesperson has completed discussions with a customer or prospect, the client on boarding team or client success management teams can easily track the most recent updates regarding the account. Hence, they can smoothly transition to the next steps and provide the client with the right services or information without spending additional time on being briefed by other departments or team members. - Breaks the loop of inaccurate data circulation:
The chances of inaccurate data being interpreted and circulated are inevitably higher in the absence of an effective tool to manage and update project pipelines. Outdated data as well as incorrect interpretations of data can disrupt established process flows, and more importantly, damage painstakingly built relationships with customers. Enterprises and sales teams can break this loop with process automation and ensure that the right data is recorded at the right place and understood correctly.
Increase process efficiency with Power BI
Building a sales analysis dashboard on Power BI can help sales teams target four distinct areas in order to simplify the handling of a large amount of data and derive useful real-time insights from them. These are as follows:
Sales Pipeline: It offers a comprehensive view of the sales opportunities created a breakdown of the data by customer type, and performance analysis.
Sales Quote Target Metrics: This metric gives real-time insights into the performance of all the employees in a company. It offers a one-glance view of how many employees have met the target and how many are trailing, along with the average sales quota and region-based division of sales performance.
Sale Trends Representation: The Power BI dashboard can also be configured to display a detailed analysis of current sale trends with a comparison of performance between two or more periods. Here, the numerical and graphical analysis feature is perfect for analyzing future sale prospects.
Sales Performance Analysis: This dashboard gives a comprehensive and smart analysis of overall performance to compare profit margins. It reflects the actual and target margins for sales teams to get a quick summary of the performance.
All these possibilities offered by Power BI become more efficient and impactful when it is connected with SharePoint to cross-share data automatically with the help of Power Automate, to create functional analysis reports and studies.
Benefits of sales analytics and automation with SharePoint and Power Apps
For a business to make most out of its digital investments and deployments, it is crucial to customize and configure them to closely resemble processes and workflows within the organization. This way, you can ensure that the deployed tools work for your teams and make them more efficient rather than your teams working around the tools. The combination of Power BI with SharePoint and Power Automate will only be truly beneficial when it is customized in the right manner. Here are a few potential benefits of the same:
Predictive Forecasting: Sales analytics system offers a multitude of trends, inputs, values, fluctuations and cycles of the data collected and stored in different sections of a business to make predictions. This detailed forecast is valuable for the future of a company.
Enhanced lead management: The methodologies used for capturing potential leads and identifying prospects becomes easier with the accuracy of stored data in SharePoint and the automation capabilities of Power Automate.
Conversion with real-time sales insights: The real-time insights derived with Power BI integration are highly beneficial in increasing sales conversions. Identifying and targeting a potential customer base becomes easier with such high-level technical support to the sales teams.
Improved client management: With a detailed analytical approach, reading clients’ behavior and purchasing patterns becomes simpler and faster. The past purchase records reflected in SharePoint with Power BI analyzing the data and offering insights are sufficient for anticipating future demand patterns and building result-driven campaign strategies.
Increased employee productivity: Every effort and investment made in BPA should ultimately help increase the productivity of employees. Contrary to popular belief, automated tools do not make employees complacent, but can get the best out of them by enabling them to be creative and focus on selling instead of managing data.
The combination of these three powerful software offers depth and simplicity of analysis that can transform your business. But the next, and most natural, question is how to achieve this? That’s where VBeyond Digital comes in.
Our team possesses accumulated domain expertise and cross-technology knowledge to create development initiatives using Microsoft tools and technologies. With our end-to-end support and cumulative experience for all kinds of automation and analytics needs, reaping the maximum benefits of these tools is not a challenge at all.
Feel free to contact us for more information.
