Operational data analytics in CRM for complex sales

Operational analytics in CRM allows managers to quickly analyze the current situation on transactions, identify trends in sales and respond to changes in customer behavior. This makes it possible to timely adjust the strategy of working with clients, identify problem areas and make informed decisions based on relevant data. As a result, the efficiency of the sales department and the quality of customer service increase.

Let’s understand how quality operational analytics benefit businesses and what CRM tools help you make faster management decisions.

Why you need operational analytics in business

Operational analytics plays an important role in improving the quality of management decisions. Having the ability to quickly find and analyze the necessary data, managers can:

1. to promptly identify problems in transactions at early stages;
2. more efficiently allocate resources between projects;
3. more accurately forecast sales results;
4. faster adapt to changes in market conditions

All this directly affects the competitiveness of the business – the speed of decision-making often becomes a key success factor.

Operational analytics as a competitive advantage

Operational analytics requires data and convenient tools to work with them. These can often be found in a CRM system that already has all the information about transactions, sales and amounts. When a company utilizes the full analytics capabilities of a CRM, the business gets tangible benefits from the data.

To evaluate the effectiveness of CRM analytics, companies can track the following metrics:

• time spent by employees to search for information;
• speed of decision-making on transactions;
• changes in deal lifecycle times;
• conversion dynamics at different stages of the sales funnel;
• employee satisfaction with data tools

The use of an effective system of operational analytics allows companies not only to develop the maturity of internal processes, but also significantly improve their position in the market due to faster and better management decisions.

Operational analytics in SimpleOne B2B CRM

SimpleOne B2B CRM has a set of tools for operational analytics that allow you to quickly obtain data, interact with it and customize reports for any task:

1. Condition Builder with support for complex queries

With a flexible condition builder that supports sophisticated data filtering logic, users can create multi-level queries using AND and OR operators to fine-tune data sampling to meet specific needs.

For example, a sales manager can set up a filter to analyze potential risks, which will display all possible deals where OR the estimated closing date is more than 30 days past due, OR the last activity was more than 1 week ago. This will quickly identify trades that require immediate attention.

2. Dynamic Filters

The system supports dynamic filters that are automatically updated based on the current date, for example. This allows you to quickly create reports that always show up-to-date information, for example, you can collect data from the first day of the current month or from the third Wednesday of the last month – no need to manually select the date.

Dynamic filters can be customized to meet business needs, for example, using company-specific periods such as fiscal year and fiscal quarter.

3. Dot-walking to work with linked data

The technology of the above-described access to fields of records related to the current record, as well as fields related to related records (and so on) is called dot-walking. Such functionality in CRM-system allows you to analyze data not only within one table, but also to address related records, without performing complex queries and merging tables.

For example, the table “Customers” is linked to the table “Deals” – from this data the manager needs to collect information about the regions of transactions to evaluate profitable sales directions. With dot-walking, an employee can use the “Location” attribute, which is specified in the card of the company linked to the deal, to search for deals.

Dot-walking allows making filters not only by attributes of the current table, but also by attributes of related tables.

You can also use this mechanism to display these additional columns in the table view, search, sort and group them.

4. Table Inheritance

Table inheritance is a CRM system functionality that allows you to create hierarchical data structures. In this case, child tables can inherit common fields from the parent table, attributes, access rights settings and business rules, being able to use their own unique fields, forms and record processing logic.

For example, the child tables Meetings, Calls, and Emails are inherited from the parent table Actions. All these tables have common fields such as “Subject” and “Date” inherited from the parent table. At the same time, each child table has its own unique fields.

This structure allows users to view all types of actions in a single list and build reports on it. At the same time, each action type can be treated as an independent table.

5. Fast search by substrings in columns

Substring search is a functionality that allows users to find the information they are looking for by typing part of a word or phrase into the search box. This feature makes searching more flexible and efficient and allows users to quickly find the information they are looking for even when the search data is incomplete or inaccurate, such as when the exact spelling of a company is unknown or only the name of an employee is known.

6. Attribute sifting for quick selection of relevant data

SimpleOne B2B CRM provides tools to interactively filter or “sift” through data, allowing users to quickly narrow down the sample as they analyze it. This is especially useful when there is no clear understanding of what data is needed – you can interactively sift out unnecessary information from the available filter and leave only the necessary records.

7. Create reports in two clicks

SimpleOne B2B CRM allows you to create visual reports literally in two clicks: to do this, you need to select the column of interest, right-click and click “Build Chart”. The system automatically generates a report that can be further customized as needed.

There are many types of reports in the system functionality: bar chart, pie chart, arrow indicator, numeric indicator, time scale, trend chart, list, summary table, heat map, multi-level table, etc.

8. Interactive reports with drill-down capability

Reports in the system are interactive and support drill-down analysis, allowing users to drill down into the data, moving from the big picture to more detailed information. For example, by clicking on a segment of a pie chart, the user will see a list of records that form that segment.

This approach allows you to quickly move from general trends to specific cases, which is especially useful for identifying root causes of problems and making informed decisions. Drill-down analysis makes it possible to examine data in different sections without creating many separate reports, which saves time and increases the efficiency of analytical work.

9. Dashboards for analyzing marketing and sales performance

SimpleOne B2B CRM offers tools for creating informative dashboards that combine several reports and indicators on one page. Dashboards support automatic updating of data with a specified frequency.

10. Export data to Excel

For more in-depth analysis, data can be transferred to Excel, with dot-walking preserving the structure of the linked data.

11. Integration with business intelligence systems

SimpleOne B2B CRM is easily integrated with popular BI systems – data can be easily transferred to an external analytics system and used to generate complex retrospective reports.

Summary

Operational analytics enables companies to make informed decisions and improve sales and marketing effectiveness. In addition to optimizing internal processes, user-friendly analytics tools help you respond faster to market changes and gain a competitive advantage.