Office 365 MyAnalytics Available for the Masses

Do you ever leave work feeling like you didn't accomplish anything? Well, maybe you didn't! Microsoft has decided to make MyAnalytics available to almost all Office 365 subscriptions so you can start being more efficient at work, today.

What is Power BI? An Introduction

BI is a bit of a buzzword these days, but why should you care? "BI" stands for "Business Intelligence;" the study of performing data analysis with business data. Using tools like Power BI, we can dive deeper into analyzing business data and visualizing the results. Power BI is included in Office 365 meaning it's available to every user. No matter your role, you need to know how to use this powerful tool.

Track Goals in Power BI with Constant Lines

Many of our clients want to track a metric over time against a goal using Power BI.  Let's take a look at how to add a Goal Line to your bar charts in Power BI for this purpose.

Why Collaboration?

There is a lot of discussion about collaboration in the workplace, but little explanation as to why it is becoming increasingly important.  This infographic explains the four primary business-drivers behind the movement towards collaboration between employees, customers and suppliers.  

Lead Scoring – Other Ways to Use Scoring – Part 4 of 4

Lead Scoring – The Scoring Options – Part 2 of 4

Marketing: Why won’t the salespeople work our leads?

Sales: Why won’t the marketing people give us good leads?

Sound familiar?  Part of the answer to this age-old dilemma is lead scoring.  In this post, let’s dive into the different options for lead scoring.

Lead Scoring – Convert Hot Leads to Customers – Part 1 of 4

You may already know that about 80% of the leads that your organization invests thousands of dollars to generate are never worked by your sales team.  But do you know why?  It’s because 98% of the leads you generate … stink.

And your sales team has no way of knowing which 2% of the leads are worth following up.  So it’s easier for them to work on the deals that are already in the pipeline and work with their networking contacts to generate referrals that are almost always more qualified than those danged marketing leads.

So how do you help your sales team find the gold nuggets buried in that mountain of leads?

Simplifying BI: Sharing Our Experiences & 3 Steps to Build Something Meaningful TODAY

The primary reason for this blog post is to share what our experience (aka the real world) has taught us on how to practically implement Business Intelligence (BI) for our clients. I’ll do my best to keep this short-and-sweet, because in all honesty there’s plenty to say on this topic, and enough BI buzzwords and statistics to confuse the entire island of Manhattan!

Excel Overload: How Much is Too Much?

Microsoft Excel is an amazing tool both in terms of the diversity of functions that it can provide and in the depth of data analytics and business intelligence that it makes available to people at every level of an organization.  But too often businesses find that they are using it to solve problems that are much more complex that Excel was intended to solve - and paying a price in terms of employee productivity and costly decisions made using bad data.

So how do you know you've taken your Excel application too far?  And what do you do about it?

Are you taking advantage of multi-dimensional analytics with OLAP cubes?

Many companies spend a lot of money, time and effort to build a data warehouse and OLAP cubes, however they start using them to build the same old 2D reports that they were used to from the past. The standard 2D canned reports (Rows and Columns) can be built from any conventional relational database by writing some standard SQL queries. So why use an OLAP (On Line Analytic Processing) cube for such reports?

Game-Changing Dashboards Combining SharePoint and CRM

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now.  Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM).  Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance?  Simple.  Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business.  Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.

Visualizations: How to Create Charts and Dashboards in Dynamics CRM 2011

One of Microsoft’s goals with Dynamics CRM 2011 was to deliver intelligent experiences across the enterprise. Some of the most important items that Microsoft included in the CRM 2011 toolbox for that are charts and dashboards – collectively referred to as visualizations. Visualizations not only provide a way to rapidly boil a lot of data down into a chart or graph; they also allow managers and users drill down on data and move from analysis to action very quickly. Visualizations can be created at the “system” level (for distribution across your enterprise), and users can create them at the “personal” level (for their own individual use, or to share selectively with colleagues).  In this entry, I’ll take a look at how to create personal Charts and Dashboards in 5 easy steps.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Which clients should we focus more time on? Are there any clients that we should consider firing? How can we find new clients that look like our best current clients? Do we have clients that should be more profitable?

These are the questions that many B2B firms are asking themselves as they think through how they should prioritize their client list.  So read on for some of the how’s and why’s of establishing a client scoring system.