sales apps enable collaboration and drive sales...

© 2014 QlikTech International AB. All rights reserved. Qlik®, QlikView®, QlikTech®, and the QlikTech logos are trademarks of QlikTech International AB which have been registered in multiple countries. Other marks and logos mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Sales apps enable collaboration and drive sales performance at Qlik

Challenges:

• Provide better pipeline visibility

• Empower sales users to be more productive

• Create single source of truth for disparate sales data

• Support IT governance

Solution:

Qlik uses Qlik internally to run the business, and sales is no exception. The entire sales organization are heavy users of Qlik solutions which enable them to plan, forecast, prospect and drive sales performance across the company.

“There are a number of different applications but I think the most important one is Sales 360 which allows our salespeople, our sales managers, right the way through to myself, to have a clean view as to what is happening in the organization:

who are we selling to, what the pipeline is like, what our sales are like, where are we selling, where are we not selling.

“It gives us a very clean understanding as to where we’re engaging incorrectly with our prospects and more importantly, where do we need to engage” says Richard Timperlake, SVP Worldwide Sales at Qlik.

Sales 360, built on the QlikView platform, has enabled the Qlik sales team as well as the marketing, finance and executive teams to better collaborate on driving increased sales performance. A range of other sales applications built on QlikView and Qlik Sense are employed to plan and manage the sales across the board: Market 360 for market planning, Qompass for sales prospecting, Account Profiles for account planning, Pipeline Metrics for campaign performance, are among the most innovative and effective sales apps at Qlik.

About QlikQlik (NASDAQ: QLIK) is a leader in data discovery delivering intuitive solutions for self-service data visualization and guided analytics.

Approximately 33,000 customers rely on Qlik solutions to gain meaning out of information from varied sources, exploring the hidden relationships within data that lead to insights that ignite good ideas. Headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania, Qlik has offices around the world with more than 1700 partners covering more than 100 countries.

Value:

• More predictable pipeline and better revenue forecasting

• Improved sales productivity

• Greater agility to anticipate and respond to market demands and potential risks

• Improved collaboration with other departments

Functions:

Qlik Solutions for Sales

Qlik for Salesforce.com

Unlocking Your Sales Data With User Driven BI

Data sources:Salesforce.com Marketo NetSuite

“Being able to analyze the pipeline in detail gives us a

powerful read on the business, that allows us to take

preemptive action before we hit any sort of problem.”

“One measure of a product is how do the

pre-sales guys really relate to it, and they

have taken up Qlik Sense incredibly well.”

http://www.qlik.com/us/explore/solutions/functions/saleshttp://www.qlik.com/us/explore/solutions/data-source/salesforcehttp://www.qlik.comhttp://www.qlik.comhttp://www.qlik.comhttp://www.qlik.com

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Unlocking Your Sales Data with User-Driven BIFive Essential Components for Successful Business DiscoveryAn ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper Prepared for Qlik

May 2014

Table of Contents

©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Unlocking Your Sales Data with User-Driven BI

Who Holds the Keys to Your Success? .............................................................................................. 1

The Rise of Business Discovery .................................................................................................... 1

Business Discovery Drivers .......................................................................................................... 2

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your Business ..................................................................................... 3

Enabling Sales Organizations ............................................................................................................ 3

5 Essential Components for Successful Business Discovery .............................................................. 4

Best-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check List ...................................................................................... 6

EMA Perspective ............................................................................................................................... 7

http://www.enterprisemanagement.com

©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com1


Who Holds the Keys to Your Success?You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car. Why should you need to be one to get access to enterprise data and insight? Since the early days of business intelligence (BI) “mechanics” or IT professionals have been the gatekeepers to reports, dashboards and most any data driven business insight. This service model worked in the early days when business intelligence tools were in the hands of just a few users and IT was able to serve their needs. As the user community grew and matured more business professionals have demanded access to data to better understand their business; user-driven business intelligence solutions have addressed that need.

User-driven BI is designed to empower sales professionals and managers with easy-to-use yet powerful tools that address the challenges of agility, speed and innovation. These solutions can provide easier access to data than generally available with more traditional BI systems. This flexibility helps stakeholders to leverage data and make decisions at the speed of their business.

As data strategies become more streamlined an “information supply chain” forms that enables companies to work with information in a variety of ways. Today’s systems are creating value throughout the supply chain leveraging information in its raw form or modeled to drive analysis, visualization, collaboration and storytelling.1 As the data is utilized throughout the supply chain companies are positioning information on a variety of platforms purpose built to meet the needs of the business. User-driven platforms need to be able to work seamlessly across diverse ecosystems and deploy their insights to a wide variety of consumers on multiple delivery platforms (cloud, mobile, desktop). When data is managed more strategically sales professionals are able to more easily access and leverage data. This data access allows executives to make better and faster business decisions side-stepping the often-laborious task of relying on IT for access to information.

User-driven BI or discovery platforms can enable business users to:

•Visualize information in easy to understand yet powerful formats

• Interactively explore information to discover critical insights

•Work seamlessly across platforms, including mobile devices

• Leverage the collective knowledge of their teams through collaborative features

•Communicate the findings in a pervasive manner allowing others across the enterprise to leverage key insights and business driven decisions.

The Rise of Business DiscoveryThe ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) team defines these new “diverse ecosystems” in terms of the Hybrid Data Ecosystem (HDE). The EMA HDE is an enabler of innovation that helps companies move away from the inflexible architecture of traditional BI. Maneuvering data towards a single platform has proven too inflexible and extremely time consuming. Building a strategy around matching data types, workloads and platforms is proving to be more valuable to most enterprise companies. This strategy provides a palette of data solutions that can be employed to meet the needs of flexibility, agility and to enhance overall insight and innovation.

1 Donald Farmer, 2013

User-driven BI is designed to empower

sales professionals and managers with easy-to-

use yet powerful tools



Discovery platforms and user-driven BI are an excellent example of these new business intelligence paradigms. The idea of utilizing the best possible tool or platform for the workload is a key component to the value and rise of user-driven BI or discovery platforms. Delivering a solution purpose built to meet the needs of line of business professionals empowers them, speeds time to insight and enables decisions to be made at the speed of the business.

Discovery platforms are very much a product of necessity in traditional business intelligence architectures. They address the largest obstacles standing between business leaders and action by creating an environment of self-service and insight. A discovery platform user poses the tools necessary to make decisions without relying on IT for critical access and assistance. Purpose built platforms often deliver custom interfaces and features specifically designed to make adoption of these platforms easier by the business and are designed for various levels of expertise making it easier for more users to utilize insights. The rise of discovery platforms is setting a new standard of agility, usability and value for line of business professionals.

Business Discovery DriversThere is a set of drivers at work driving this change within the BI landscape. Each driver on its own may not be the force necessary to make enterprise companies rethink their strategy, but as a combined force they are nearly impossible to ignore.

•Maturing Users and Applications – There are clear shifts converging on our analytic and operational environments. Great demands are being put on traditional systems to support the maturing needs of end users and to address the creativity required by a new breed of knowledge worker. User-driven analytics are changing the game and putting power in the hands of Sales organizations and reducing the load put on IT teams and departments. A more complex analytics workload coupled with a larger more diverse population of users is taxing traditional systems beyond their abilities, creating a need for more diverse platforms and solutions.

• Economics – Commodity hardware, low cost storage and memory are creating an opportunity to address projects that once were beyond the fiscal reach of most companies. The ability to add new purpose-built solutions to the data management landscape is affordable for many and driving a decentralization of the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in favor of solutions better suited to specific needs.

• TechnologyAdvancements – The spirit of Moore’s law2 is alive and well in the enterprise. The systems available today eclipse the scale and performance of those we invested in just a few short years ago. This ongoing improvement arc is fueling our ability to address faster and more complex analytics. In-memory computing, massively parallel processing (MPP) are now common technologies deployed to power analytics and applications dependent on data.

• ValuableDataSources – For years, we have been forced to ignore various data sources that could prove valuable to our work processes and analytic insights. These data sources came in structures and sizes not easily accepted by traditional platforms. The combination of the above drivers now makes it possible to leverage traditional and new data sources in our projects. New data sources such as social data, machine generated data and sensor data are all important to powering more complex analysis of our businesses.

2 Moore’s Law, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law

Discovery platforms are very much a product of necessity

in traditional business intelligence architectures.



The combination of these drivers causes IT to look beyond traditional strategies to an array of platforms that can support the growing needs of their user community. Cloud, discovery platforms, data marts, enterprise data warehouses, analytic platforms, Hadoop, NoSQL and operational systems are purpose built to meet these new hurdles and enable innovation. By acknowledging these drivers forward-looking companies see great value in providing user-driven BI and discovery platforms to sales executives especially when their data is spread over a diverse ecosystem of solutions and platforms. As data grows within the enterprise, it is even more critical for the business to see and leverage all data that affects its business.

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your BusinessWork processes that support decision-making come in all shapes and sizes. The one below depicts a standard process that data professionals have to go through to capture the business insight. In absence of user-driven BI and/or discovery solutions, users have to rely on the assistance of IT team for all of these steps. This dependence can cause delays in implementation and added work for business stakeholders coordinating between the various IT teams. User-driven platforms are uniquely positioned to impact each of these areas.

User-driven platforms can provide easy access to better understand the data available and how it impacts sales organizations and its processes. Leading platforms avoid the need for tedious data preparation and transformation. These two steps generally account for 60%–80% of the time spent when executing analytic projects. This is especially true when initial analysis creates a demand for additional data. User-driven solutions remove this burden from IT and empower the business user with an agile solution that provides insight at the speed of business and perhaps a competitive advantage over competition that’s forced to operate in traditional data management service models.

Enabling Sales OrganizationsZig Ziglar, the famous sales trainer and advisor to Fortune 500 sales organizations, shared this quote often in his classes:

“Don’t count the things you do, do the things that count.”

There is a lot of wisdom in these words especially if you apply them to the challenges that today’s data-driven sales organizations have to overcome. Too much effort is invested in unclear, unspecific, and unproven sales and management processes because the task seems important. However, the organization lacks the insight to prove it or the ability to focus on the things that really count. Smart sales organizations are turning to user-driven business intelligence to improve the processes and functions of their sales organizations.



These organizations are a critical component in the success of a company and they require the ability to see and understand the business clearly. Competitive landscapes are getting more complex and difficult to navigate making it more difficult to compete. Speed and accuracy play a role in how efficiently a sales organization can react to opportunities and trends. Ziglar makes the point that success comes from doing what counts and data plays a key role in empowering the ability to identify what counts.

User driven platforms can overcome these challenges and enable sales organizations to better react and manage their business. Extending beyond the act of selling and reacting to competition pressures, sales organizations need to adopt platforms that enable deep and accurate insights across sales operations, service and support, marketing functions, and sales alliances and channels, to gain the full perspective required to run the sales organization. The value for sales goes beyond simple agility and speed, by putting customer analytics directly in the hands of executives to eliminate the time gap between business knowledge and business insights, allowing a higher level of service and creating more profitable transactions. As sales organizations adopt user-driven business intelligence, they are armed with a greater level of insight regarding business challenges.

By eliminating the time delay between inquiry and answer, user-driven BI and discovery platforms allow these professionals to arrive at an analysis quicker. This more agile analytical process creates the opportunity to realize unforeseen insights and more “aha moments” that truly add value to the business’ bottom line. Discovery platforms and sophisticated line of business professionals are a perfect storm of technology and insight in the drive for competitive edge.

5 Essential Components for Successful Business DiscoveryEmpowering sales professionals with faster and deeper insights is an easy value proposition to endorse. It’s important to examine your data management ecosystem to ensure you’re well prepared to support user-driven platforms. Each platform will include features that can automate or assist in executing on these components. The users view these critical components differently but they illustrate areas where both play a role in the success of user-driven projects.

Sales Challenges Business Description Why it’s Essential

Customer Targeting Can support up-sell and cross-sell opportunities?

Clearly understanding your customers is paramount to the success of any sales organization. Sales management is often challenged to “see” customers and prospects through a lens that supports cross-selling and up-selling to improve profits. Blending disparate data sources to leverage customer demographic, historical purchase, social and third-party data is a core competency of leading user-driven analytic solutions and a requirement to meet the demands of this critical insight.

Bringing this data together on a platform designed to meet the needs and expertise of a sales management professional enables the refinement of sales process and strategies that impact revenue and profitability while greatly improving sales enablement.

The value for sales goes beyond simple

agility and speed.

(Table continued on next page)



Sales Challenges Business Description Why it’s Essential

Enhanced Customer Interaction

Is critical customer and product data available where and when you interact with valued customers?

Customers and prospects are more sophisticated than ever. They communicate with vendors by indirect channels. Bringing this data together on a single platform can easily provide a competitive advantage when interacting with them. Having this information available when and where you interact with clients and prospects is critical to better understanding of their needs and the opportunity they present.

User-driven business intelligence provides a platform that can access this type of information and deliver it quickly to sales professionals in the field or from a desk. The speed of response and depth of insight that comes with these platforms enables a more sophisticated sales approach and a shorter sales cycle.

Leverage Your CRM Platform

Can your sales organization unlock the critical data within your CRM system for greater insight?

CRM systems, like Salesforce.com, represent significant corporate invest in customer interaction and sales enablement. All too often these systems can become disconnected platforms within the corporate data ecosystem.

These platforms perform at a high level with regards to work process and hold extremely valuable data. Unfortunately many sales organizations find these platforms lacking when it comes to data access and analytics. User-driven business intelligence platforms can open the door to the data locked within an organizations CRM platform and provide deep insights that sales organizations can leverage for success.

Leading platforms can augment Salesforce.com by leveraging data with highly integrated connectors, embed analytics directly into the Salesforce.com workflows to create a connection between CRM data and other valuable data and processes.

Pipeline Management

Can you go beyond traditional pipeline reports to innovative insight and action?

Pipeline management doesn’t have to be a chore for sales management. Utilizing user-driven business intelligence puts control in the hands of the executive to turn a mundane task into an opportunity to excel and differentiate. User-driven solutions leverage data from multiple sources to create a more accurate and timely view of the sales process.

These platforms allow sales management to slice and dice live data to unearth risks and opportunities through what-if analysis while adding value to traditional insights like forecasting and budget analysis.

Leading platforms incorporate more than numbers and access the domain knowledge of the entire team through collaboration features. User-driven platforms that include collaboration enable stakeholders at all phases of sales processes to add context to the ongoing analysis providing the sales organization a competitive advantage over lesser featured systems

Performance Management

Can access to more information and collaboration take your forecasting and sales insight to a new level?

Traditionally, sales organizations relied on historical data to determine future forecasts, staffing levels and necessary resources for execution. CRM systems are often the only source of information as it is difficult in traditional environments to bring all the related data together in a single platform for better analysis.

Self-driven business intelligence platforms create a fast and agile environment designed to tap into diverse data sets and provide strong insights. Companies forced to rely on limited data miss the opportunity to transform their sales organizations by coupling financial, CRM system, marketing and campaign, purchasing history and service data to create a meaningful platform to take action against and to manage overall performance.

Leading platforms deliver these features along with collaboration that enables the sales organization to share insights and create context around performance metrics.



Best-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check ListEMA utilizes a set of standards within its business intelligence continuum to identify common traits and best of breed functionality for various solutions. In the case of user-driven solutions a focus on data acquisition, data management, business analytics and knowledge delivery are critical.

In the EMA Business Intelligence Continuum, the initial level is data acquisition. Best of breed user-driven platforms depend on strong and accurate data acquisition. These functions are generally built into the platform or achieved via a partner technology.

•Data access functionality must be easily administered and pervasive across multiple data sources.

•Multiple data source integration is critical for better insight and user-driven interaction.

•Highly configurable security features are especially important for platforms that share insights and feature collaborative functionality.

After data acquisition, user-driven platforms need to manage the data from an organization’s source systems. Data management can include the following data governance disciplines:

•Data quality and cleansing to maintain standard organizational standards.

•Metadata management for consistency with data definitions within an organization for areas such as product, customer and analytical measurements.

•Data retention and archive to maintain the appropriate level of information within a business intelligence platform for the domain of analysis of the platform’s mission.

With data ingested and properly administered from the data acquisition and data management layers of the EMA Business Intelligence Continuum, a user-driven platform can then perform analysis on the data to transform it into information.

•Best-of-breed, user-driven platforms should deliver simple query results, and more importantly multi-dimensional analysis leveraging a diverse group of data sources.

•Advanced platforms may deliver predictive analytics as well.

•The ability to easily explore data enhances the discovery process and adds value that is critical for user-driven environments.

Knowledge delivery represents the last section of the EMA Business intelligence Continuum that’s applicable to user-driven platforms. When information is generated from the business analytics layer of a platform, it is critical to communicate this knowledge with a wide audience outside of the users/operators of the platform.

The ability to easily explore data enhances the discovery process.



•User-driven platforms focus on dashboards and can deliver various levels of dynamic access to the data presented as a graphical interface via web, mobile or client application.

•Advanced systems deliver collaborative feature sets that enable users to leverage the knowledge of their team or company to make faster and better decisions.

• Some platforms are also focusing on better ways to communicate or tell the story of their insights with infographics and advanced delivery methods.

EMA PerspectiveUser-driven BI and discovery platforms are answering the need to empower the business users within enterprise-sized companies. Leading platforms have proven equal to the challenge for data acquisition, data management, business analytics and knowledge delivery. Some are striking a balance between IT support and control while empowering business users. The ROI of these platforms are easy to calculate as they are affecting time to value decision cycles with speed and agility, off-loading work from IT, and providing a competitive advantage to companies that adopt these solutions.

EMA identifies user-driven discovery platforms as a necessary tool to enable analytic success within companies of all size. In particular, EMA feels that sales teams and processes benefit from user-driven BI and data discovery platforms. Sales organizations need to operate not on the speed of their IT teams’ response rate, but rather at the pace of imagination from sales professionals and variable trends in service product offerings. Waiting for IT teams should not be an excuse for failing to capitalize on opportunities to drive revenue and better serve customers no matter what type of organization. User-driven BI and data discovery platforms can arm sales organizations with the measurement information that their less agile competitors are incapable of attaining. This leads to additional opportunity and greater market share.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. “EMA” and “Enterprise Management Associates” are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

©2014 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. EMA™, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

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Sales organizations need to operate not on the

speed of their IT teams’ response rate, but rather

at the pace of imagination

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Who Holds the Keys to Your Success?

The Rise of Business Discovery

Business Discovery Drivers

Impact of User-Driven BI on Your Business

Enabling Sales Organizations

5 Essential Components for Successful Business Discovery

Best-of-Breed Selection Criteria Check List

EMA Perspective

Qlik website 1: Qlik website: Salesforce: Sales solutions:

sales apps enable collaboration and drive sales...

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