Importance of Embedded Analytics in the Efficiency of a Sales Department
Introduction
Tracking the sales performance of their business is one of a sales manager’s daily tasks. They can identify strategies that are working well and areas they need to invest in, drawing strategic plans to prevent risk and increase revenue. With embedded analytics, sales representatives can speed up this process by leveraging a sales activity tracker in their daily software. In this blog post, I am going to give you an overview of how Bold BI helps sales department managers track results from their data and make decisions based on analytics.
Contents:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of embedding a sales activity tracker dashboard.
- Bold BI’s sales activity tracker.
- How to embed analytic tools into a sales app.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It enables nontechnical people to monitor data sets with attractive dashboards and glean all the insights they need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedding a Sales Activity Tracker Dashboard
Embedding a sales activity tracker in your app helps you identify some of the key areas that need change in your company by presenting metrics and KPIs in comprehensive widgets. Businesses can pinpoint strengths to be promoted and weaknesses to be improved in sales, which increases revenue. The following are some of the benefits of embedded analytics to business operators:
- More effective sales management.
- Increased profitability.
- Prediction of future sales performance.
- Identification of activities leading to business success.
More effective sales management
Embedding a sales activity tracker in your day-to-day sales application eases the sales management process by allowing leaders to monitor results in real time. In this blog, we will be using an event management company as an example business, which tracks metrics such as ticket sales. Sales representatives can see all the details they need concerning their ticket transaction information, including event start times, categories, events, venues, tickets available, tickets sold, price per ticket, and total revenue. Analyzing the reports from these metrics lets them identify opportunities that were not fulfilled. By using customer feedback and results from data analysis in their industry, managers will be able to figure out what factors played into the success or failure of attracting interest to events. Steps can be taken to improve sales through more focused marketing or choosing different venues to host particular kinds of events.
Increases profitability
Many business operators experience the same issues occurring frequently in their business but recognizing them and identifying their causes can take time. Embedding a sales activity tracker allows managers to monitor key metrics that help identify problems faster than employees may otherwise notice. The root of problems leading to the frequent decrease in ticket sales can then be found and fixed more quickly . They will be able to examine the activities of their sales team, the sales figures, and customer feedback to see where expectations are not being met. On the other hand, if an event quickly sold out of tickets, tickets for similar events may sell at a higher price than the company was charging. A dashboard can quickly show event planners what factors highly successful events have in common in order to determine which future events are similar and therefore where profits can increase.
Prediction of future sales performance
Getting to know the real-time performance of your sales team helps you to predict its future performance with greater accuracy. Use a sales activity tracker dashboard to track metrics such as events versus buyers, available tickets, and dates of ticket sales versus promotions. Close monitoring of these metrics allows sales managers to confer with the marketing department on methods of promotion best to use in the future and predict ticket sales depending on factors such as demographics, venue location, and event dates. Managers can also monitor in general the success, for example, of other companies and venues hosting similar events in order to determine ideal ticket pricing. Monitoring all this data in an easy-to-understand dashboard enables decision-makers to improve future sales performance.
Identification of activities leading to business success
Tracking metrics such as ticket sales per agent, number of emails sent by agent, and time spent on phone calls by agent allows managers to have a clear picture of the sales performance of their teams. Examining these metrics gives them insight into the top-performing agents and those agents who may need more training, and shows the correlation between their sales numbers and how they spend their time. The best sales representatives can be asked to share what they believe to be the keys to their success in training sessions, giving them a challenge and improving the success of the whole company. As before mentioned, visualizing other metrics lets leaders spot correlations between specific kinds of promotions and high ticket sales (and low ticket sales), and customer feedback can be used to improve the sales process or even the venues themselves.
Bold BI’s Sales Activity Tracker dashboard example
Sales Activity Tracker Dashboard
This embedded Sales Activity Tracker Dashboard example helps track key metrics that enable hypothetical managers to examine the total number of events and total number of tickets sold within a given time through the Amazon Redshift data connection.
Key metrics and KPIs:
- Available tickets.
- Sales amount.
- Users by category.
- Ticket summary.
- Tickets sold by category across states.
- Paid amount by month: Last six months.
- Tickets sold by date.
- Top 5 events based on tickets sold.
Available tickets
This number card shows the currently available tickets.
Sales amount
This number card shows the total amount earned by a business from the sale of tickets.
Users by category
This doughnut chart shows the percentage of users in each category type.
Ticket summary
The grid shows the ticket transaction information.
Tickets sold by category across states
This tree map tracks tickets sold by category name and state the venues were in. This makes the interests of potential customers in different places clearer to event planners.
Paid amount by month: Last six months
The area chart shows the sales amount over the last six months.
Ticket sold by date
This spline chart shows the total number of tickets sold within given dates.
Top 5 events based on tickets sold
This doughnut shows the top five events by tickets sold as percentages of the total of tickets sold by all five events.
To learn more about the key metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Sales Activity Tracker dashboard demo.
How to embed analytics tools into a sales app
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into your sales applications. Bold BI helps you embed your dashboards on 18 web platforms including React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with ASP.NET Core, and more. In this section, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards in ASP.NET MVC applications. Consider a scenario in which your sales team has an app like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server on your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment instructions here.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET MVC application.
First, create an ASP.NET MVC application. Open Microsoft Visual Studio and click New Project. Then choose ASP.NET MVC Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embedded properties.
After the ASP.NET MVC web application is created, you need to create a model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like “site/site1.” For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use “cloud.” If using Bold BI, you should use “enterprise.”User Email : Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication. You can get it from the Bold BI server. Click the settings icon in the left navigation bar and then click the Embed tab. Click Enable embed authentication and then click Generate Secret to generate the embed secret. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in more detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If you do not save it, you will have to generate a new one using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create an authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET MVC application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure the single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using unique embed secrets. This prevents the need for the user to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Reference required script files and CSS files in HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application to embed the dashboard.
After creating the ASP.NET MVC application, you need to run it. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your ASP.NET MVC application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help a sales department to be more successful. You can create any kind of dashboard you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support questions.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on May 17, 2022.
