Give your team the power to make smarter business decisions.

With the volume of business data doubling almost every year, and as CRM adoption continues unhindered, businesses are finding themselves with more and more data every day. Unlike in the past, every possible sales interaction, every social media conversation, every missed opportunity, every call, and every service request from a customer is being stored in a CRM system. As these numbers climb, spotting trends and patterns from this massive pool of unstructured data can become tough for any business. 

Enter CRM analytics.

A CRM system with this massive pool of data shouldn’t be restricted to just a set of customer records, but should ideally be an insight-driven tool that can suggest your next action with the power of that data. Taking it one step further, businesses are increasingly looking at new ways data analytics can help internal teams, like sales, marketing, and support, do their jobs better. All this put together tells you why there’s a need for built-in analytics tools inside CRM systems, and we’re going to look at how Zoho CRM has improved its business intelligence offering with the introduction of Analytics.

What’s changed?

To match its feature additions, the Zoho CRM Dashboards module is now known as Analytics—a powerful new home for all the numbers that matter. In addition to the name change, Analytics is packed with an assortment of analytics tools that’ll help your organization’s decision-making style go from gut-feel to truly data-driven. How, you ask? Here’s a sneak peek at what’s changed and how it’s going to help you ace the analytics game.

One-step chart creation.

Charts are the most basic, yet sophisticated, form of data visualization, and now, we’re making this process even simpler with the introduction of instant charts. The new Analytics dashboard comes with an option to create charts instantly, without the need to select an existing report. Now that’s fast.

One place for your KPIs.

If you’re finding it hard to keep a tab on your important business metrics over multiple places, we’ve got some good news for you. Use KPIs as the virtual space that ties down all your key performance indicators and makes them part of your morning ritual—one place for all the information you need for the day.

Instant comparisons.

If you’ve ever needed a single platform to compare a variety of CRM metrics on, we’ve got just the thing for you—comparators. Create comparisons among users, time periods, or values from your CRM modules, stack them against a variety of parameters, and get a comprehensive overview in minutes. It’s as simple as that.

Detecting anomalies.

Take a moment to think about this. You encounter an unexpected revenue drop, and you have no clue what caused it. The number of leads you’re generating is far lower than your average, and you find deals taking more time to close than usual. Those are bad signs for any business, right? But don’t worry yet, you need not wait too long to get all these information when you have our anomaly detector set up. Not just your past performances, Zia’s intelligent anomaly detection will also help you align your current performance with your expected results.

End-to-end pipeline tracking.

One of the most important aspects of your sales process is your pipeline. Whether you need to know the different stages where your prospects are dropping off, or how your lead sources have performed over time, or an analysis of your conversion rates—Funnel makes your pipeline analysis easier by breaking down data across your modules into easily trackable stages. It helps maintain a healthier sales pipeline by identifying weak spots you need to concentrate on, enabling you to assign resources to the areas that need attention.

Easily achieve targets.

Successful sales teams don’t just meet their targets—they exceed them. Having a target meter in your analytics arsenal makes sure your sales team knows what to shoot for, every single time. Revenue, leads, deals; whatever your goal is, the target meter keeps your expectations realistic and helps you see what you’ve achieved, what you haven’t, and what you’re close to.

While these are the feature additions, there’s a lot more that’s changed visually. The new Analytics dashboard comes with a drag-and-drop builder so you can easily customize your dashboard view. With six prebuilt dashboard types, you can quickly get started, even if you don’t want to create components from scratch. Display your team’s performance to everyone on your team with the full-screen view, and make sure the numbers are in the right hands by setting access permissions for your dashboards.

Impressed with what Analytics can do for your business? Go ahead, create your analytics dashboard now, and tell us what you think—we’re all ears.

And as always, happy selling with Zoho CRM!