Zoho Analytics enables sales analysis for The Collins Companies

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    20+Users
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    2-3 days/monthTime Saved
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    2Data Sources

"With Zoho Analytics, our sales agents have dashboards and can see their performance, the profit they create per order, and targets for the month. This is crucial for our sales team. This deep analysis was not possible before in Excel sheets or in our existing ERP system."

Toni Wall
Director of Market Development, The Collins Companies

About The Collins Companies

The Collins Companies, is one of the largest industrial distributors of engineered specialties, pipe, valve fittings, and air compressor sales and service in the Northeast. With over 100 years of experience in the industrial pipe, valve, and fitting industry, they are recognized for service in key markets such as power, original equipment manufacturing (OEM), and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) contract management, both in supplying products and repairing and testing critical valves. They combine technology with service to their customers worldwide by offering four fully staffed valve automation centers, onsite valve and actuator repair services, and a full range of engineering support. They have a presence across the United States.

Challenges: Enormous data, no BI tool

Toni Wall is the Director of Market Development. While she is responsible primarily for marketing, she also takes care of operational excellence and the creation and implementation of new systems.

The Collins Companies is using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool, Epicor Prophet 21, for their sales team. However, the reports that come out of P21 are not easy to customize. They had difficulties analyzing their weekly and monthly sales data. The analysis done within the ERP system was very basic and not at all in-depth. Wall was looking for an advanced BI platform that could integrate and blend data and derive insights from that data, thereby giving her team more control over the business.

She was in need of an overall picture that would show the performance of the team and identify potential opportunities.

The Collins Companies wanted a solution that could:

  • Import and blend raw data from multiple applications
  • Get actionable insights through reports and dashboards
  • Provide collaborative analytics with user-based permissions

"Epicor Prophet 21, our ERP tool, has lots of data in it, but it only does basic analysis and isn't capable of doing weekly or monthly comparisons. Our requirement was to do a deep dive into the sales data we have and uncover insights that would help our sales team."

Toni Wall
Director of Market Development, The Collins Companies

Solution: Sales analysis using Zoho Analytics

The Collins Companies were in need of a CRM tool and started to evaluate Salesforce and HubSpot, but finally chose Zoho CRM. They also started using Zoho Cliq and Zoho Campaigns.

They were trying to do advanced analysis of data from Zoho CRM and Epicor Prophet 21 using Microsoft Excel, but that was tedious and time consuming. That's when they started to look for a BI solution. They decided Zoho Analytics was ideal for them, because they were already using Zoho CRM.

The integration between Zoho Analytics and Zoho CRM was fast and seamless. They were able to integrate, blend, and generate reports on sales agents' performance, sales reports, and much more. The data from Epicor Prophet 21 was imported into Zoho Analytics using API integration.

Wall especially liked Zoho Analytics for features such as data visualization, filtering, pivots, drag and drop, data sync from multiple systems, seamless collaboration, and interactive reports.

The Collins Companies used Zoho Analytics to create sales metrics including:

  • Average profit per order by sales agent, branch, region, etc.
  • A weekly sales report for the leadership team that compares last year to this year, running total, etc.
  • A break-even analysis  by month and by year.

"The ease of integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics was awesome. We also brought in data from Epicor Prophet 21 through API. Once a contact is created in our ERP, it is also pushed to Zoho CRM for the sales team to follow. Now, we have to compare and analyze the data generated in these two applications and Zoho Analytics helps us do that. We are now able to track any missing orders, our average profit for each order, and our overall sales made this week vs the same time last year. This helps us stay informed about our sales team's performance and have more control over the business."

With Zoho Analytics, insights about the company's sales are communicated to each sales agent. They can log in and see their performance and sales trends for that week or month. This was critical in determining performance and identifying weak areas for the sales team.

Because most of the analysis work is now done through Zoho Analytics, the company is saving two to three days every month that were previously spent doing data analysis manually. Wall is also now able to visualize complex data easily and in a very meaningful way.

The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics can be shared with 20+ users, including sales heads and executive teams.

Benefits & results

  • The Collins Companies saves two to three days every month using Zoho Analytics.
  • Zoho Analytics enables in-depth sales analysis.
  • It enables visualization of data easily and in very meaningful ways.
  • It offers easy sharing and collaboration across teams.