The key advantages of Oracle Sales Cloud AnalyticsA couple of key take aways summed up
Reports, real-time and historical are very important in our day to day work life. What would we do without them? How else could we come up with new strategies, gain insights and make day to day decisions? Therefore I would like to discuss the key advantages of analytics. Specifically in sales; an important business department within every organization.
Why would I like to spend more time writing about analytics? Well, because organizations become more and more aware of the need to do comprehensive analysis to gain insight and to support important decision making. The increasing volume and variety of data makes it difficult to do reliable analysis. Therefore a specific analytic solution like Oracle Sales Cloud Analytics is regarded as a top priority for many managers, executives and sales representatives.
Oracle Sales Cloud Analytics provides real-time executive dashboards, prebuilt reports and guided recommendation. It gives you the power to build mobile dashboards that sales reps and sales managers can access anytime, anywhere. Professionals with the specific business roles as described in the introduction typically want to:
- Gain insight in how they need to run their business.
- Make smarter business decisions.
- Check how they are performing.
The availability of a smart business intelligence tool enables those professionals to gain that insight.
My experience with Sales Cloud Analytics
I will point out the key advantages based on my experiences with Sales Cloud and Sales Cloud Analytics during a recent implementation at one of our enterprise customers. This client has a sales force of around 500 sales representatives. Of course those sales reps are very eager to meet their targets in order to do their job right and earn their bonuses. The basic administration of this incentive compensation system was done in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which was owned by a few people. This administration was not transparent and was prone to errors. Because of the eagerness of the sales reps and the lack of transparency, a lot of questions were raised on targets, actuals and pay-outs. This made the organization of incentive compensation an extremely difficult job. The need emerged to implement an automated tool which was capable of administrating, calculating, and especially visualizing incentive compensation information.
Key features of Sales Cloud Analytics
- Real-time analytics
- 150+ prebuilt reports
- 48 executive dashboard KPI’s
- 130+ sales metrics
- 20+ sales dimensions
- 15 months historical trending
Sales Cloud Analytics is the integrated analytics module of Sales Cloud, and as the name is already suggesting, this application is fully operational in the cloud. Sales Cloud is built on a transactional database and has the advantage of an integrated Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) solution. This basically means that there is no separate data warehouse involved which needs to be loaded on a certain frequency, the queries in OTBI are directly against the transactional database. Therefore OTBI has the following key advantages:
Key benefits of Sales Cloud Analytics
- Report on real time data: because the underlying database is a transactional database, Sales Cloud Analytics reports on the same database as the Sales Cloud application itself.
- Automatic data security: OTBI reflects the security settings of Sales Cloud, this means data security is based on the organizational hierarchy, managers can see data of their own team, but are unable to see data of other teams. Team members will only see their own individual data.
- No additional configuration required: data from the transactional database will be available immediately using the standard subject areas or the big set of comprehensive out of the box reports.
- Flexibility in how to deliver the dashboards to users: the dashboards can be delivered to the user through a mobile app, by infolets in Sales Cloud or they can be embedded in the classic or Simplified UI.
- Custom-made reports: Sales Cloud Analytics gives access to “OBIEE Answers” which enables users to access the full range of OBIEE specific features like creating analyses, dashboards and agents. It is also possible to create a custom object in Sales Cloud and a custom subject area on that custom object. The custom subject area has the same features as the out of the box subject areas and enables users to be even more flexible on reporting possibilities.
- Sales Cloud configuration verification: verification is possible through the subject areas based on the configuration of Sales Cloud regarding the different modules like Incentive Compensation or Territory Management.
The result
After the completion of the Sales Cloud implementation, the tool was able to calculate incentive compensation per employee. Because of the out of the box delivered advantages, the client and I were able to focus on how we could visualize the data, rather than focusing on data quality and data security. We were able to automatically generate a contract per employee with all targets (administered in Sales Cloud) for the next year. This contract will be send out and accepted within Sales Cloud. Via the Acceptance dashboards, sales managers are able to view the acceptance status of the contract. On the Target Details Dashboard, sales reps are able to see the target details so that the employees know what they are accepting. After accepting the contract, sales reps can start selling and immediately view how they are doing on the Target vs Actuals dashboard. At the end of each quarter they can check the Payout Dashboard to see how all their effort will pay.
Due to the Sales Cloud implementation accompanied by Sales Cloud Analytics, the desired information is available in a way that works for our client. There is complete transparency which will help organizations to improve drastically. Managers can easily steer their employees during the year just by looking at how they are currently performing and what still needs to be done to accomplish their goals.
If your organization is also missing out on accurate insight, easy to use reports and mobile dashboards than you are probably interested in a further chat. Please reach out to our account managers. They are more than happy to help you find a solution that fits your needs.
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Als 2e grootste softwarehuis ter wereld, levert Oracle “state of the art” oplossingen voor klant relatie management. Oracle Sales Cloud behoort tot de absolute top waar het gaat om CRM-functionaliteit en gebruiksvriendelijkheid. Dat zéggen we niet alleen, dat menen we ook. Niet voor niets implementeren we al meer dan 15 jaar succesvol Oracle CRM-applicaties.
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