For almost all organisations, it is critical to ensure that the most functional sales management system is in place. If your salespeople can’t do their jobs to the best of their abilities, it won’t be long before you start losing out to the competition.
Customer relationship management (CRM) applications, like Microsoft Dynamics, provide a singular point of access to all data relating to your clients and business partners. However, many businesses don’t use that data to its full potential because they rely solely on the features included in the CRM software.
By integrating your CRM software with Power BI, you can gain insights into the performance of your business, boost productivity, and increase revenue. With external dataset support, detailed reports, and enhanced visualisations, Power BI can bring together all your business intelligence metrics in clear and easy-to-understand dashboards. Here we look at three key benefits that your company can derive from integrating its CRM with Power BI.
1. Improved visualisations
The ability to visualise data is vital to a productive sales team. While many CRM programs provide basic reporting options and simple graphs, they lack the depth and complexity required to gain deeper insights from your data.
Power BI is packed full of tools that provide enhanced ways of visualising data, including interactive reports, graphs, and charts. Besides the standard leads and sales data, Power BI lets you build filtered and customisable tools to monitor abstract data like customer KPIs, auto-renews, sales revenue, and contract history.
These user-friendly visualisations help staff make faster and more accurate sales decisions, speeding up delivery and maximising efficiency. You can easily monitor trends in customer spending, sales, losses and other metrics, ensuring relevant data is highlighted and tracked.
Power BI supports highly complex algorithms that can achieve far more advanced calculations and models than most CRMs. You can also create your own custom visualisations with less effort and at a lower cost than typical CRM customisation, which usually requires advanced development skills and tools.
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2. Connect CRM with other datasets
While CRM programs offer some amount of data management and analytics, they are limited to the information stored in their local databases. By integrating your CRM with Power BI you can import and export datasets from other platforms.
With Power BI, you can fully utilise this function to augment and inform other datasets using your CRM data. Powerful reporting and graph generation can be completed within your CRM using integrated Power BI tools. You can also leverage data from ERP or web-based datasets and bring in data from Excel or raw CSV files. You can consolidate data from these external sources without the need to integrate the various platforms.
If your business partners use their own proprietary databases, Power BI can be programmed to bring in data from third-party sources or websites. This ability to instantly access and utilise a broad range of data from multiple sets can turn week-long jobs into far simpler tasks. It provides all the information that your sales staff need, instantly at hand and in an appealing and easy-to-understand format.
3. Broaden your organization’s exposure to CRM data
CRM data has typically been limited to the staff who work directly with the software. Sharing data with other departments usually requires extraction in the form of reports or graphs that can be printed or shared via email. This one-way communication of data limits the amount of input that external departments can offer, restricting knowledge-sharing and feedback, and leaving many staff uninformed.
With Power BI integration, your organisation can take full advantage of its CRM by opening up the datasets to people in all departments. This means that staff who don’t have CRM training or access can have visibility into important data from vital business documents like invoices and orders. Financial staff can use Power BI to extract CRM data into graphs, helping them to make better informed business decisions with data-driven insights.
Support staff can benefit from extracted CRM data by gaining a more comprehensive understanding of which customer satisfaction approaches are the most valuable. The robust analysis tools within Power BI can drill deep down into your data, revealing insights that span across all departments and business functions.
All these features and several more are available through both the Power BI software and mobile phone app, putting the full power of CRM data-integration directly into the hands of your staff. Ultimately, enabling your staff to access and collaborate on the data they need to make informed decisions 24/7 will lead to better customer engagement and increased sales.
Empower your staff with Power BI’s advanced data analytics
We cannot understate the importance of leveraging your organisation’s data to its full capacity. With comprehensive data made available to all your staff in a clear and concise manner, your business will operate with greater productivity and higher staff satisfaction levels.
Dear Watson Consulting is Australia’s leading Microsoft Power BI specialist, providing a range of CRM Analytics tools and services to empower your business. Our services will help you to gain a 360 degree view of your customers through customised dashboards, in-depth reporting, and cross-silo data visualisations.
