The market for business analytics services is projected to surge as companies aim to improve the skills and abilities of their existing sales workforce. As demand for these services grows, managers in sales department often have expectations about the goals and outcomes of these services. However, there are common pitfalls managers can fall into if they let their misconceptions about big data and other data applications get ahead of them.
The business analytics services market will grow an average of 14.7 percent each year between 2014 and 2018, according to a report by research firm International Data Corporation. With demand quickly growing, the market is expected to climb to $89.6 billion in 2018, up from $51.6 billion in 2014.
IDC said there are a variety of applications for business analytics services that are helping to increase gains in the market.
“Talent shortage coupled with the high interest in adoption of new technologies will continue to drive growth in business analytics services spending at the worldwide level,” said Ali Zaidi, senior research analyst, IT consulting and systems integration strategies at IDC. “In addition, the desire to consume the entire life cycle of business analytics services will drive spending growth across all business analytics services lines in the near future.”
As more firms consider using business analytics services to enhance their organization, they should be aware of the myths and misconceptions surrounding these emerging services and technologies.
Here are three things sales managers often get wrong about business analytics:
More analytics means less supervision
While sales analytics and other technologies alleviate some duties from managers in terms of calculating quotas and alerting them to employee achievements, using these solutions doesn’t mean that managers should stop supervising employees during the day-to-day grind altogether. Sales performance management solutions are meant to complement the abilities of sales managers in order to improve productivity across the business. To use business analytics effectively, managers need to drive decisions about coaching and training with information collected and evaluated by this software.
Collect as much data as humanly possible
While tools for big data and sales analytics are powerful and can gather together millions of data points, sales managers may think that collecting as much information as possible means they are closer to success because they have so much information to go on. Although data itself is important to determine the direction of the market and whether sales employees are achieving their sales quotas and other goals, data is just one piece of the puzzle. Companies should focus on sales performance metrics that matter – whether they are the number of leads who turn into customers or the revenue per sale.
Change happens over night
Mukesh Dialani, research director for worldwide BPO and engineering services at IDC, said services surrounding big data and analytics will become more crucial to the internal workings of businesses.
“As these services become a key component in ensuring the agility and effectiveness of an enterprise’s business processes and vendors are able to provide a diverse range of industry-specific use cases and assist customers in preparing a business case, customer adoption will increase,” Dialani said in a statement.
While business analytics are key to improving current business functions and provide organizations with crucial insight into their performance, companies should understand that even with this information, change does not happen immediately. Armed with the knowledge provided by business analytics, managers are better prepared to create a plan that will eventually change employee behavior to get them closer to meeting their performance goals. This process will take time, but it will be worth it once businesses find themselves maintaining relationships with life-long customers.
