IBRS improves their sales efficiency with Zoho Analytics

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"Zoho Analytics has increased our overall sales process. Every Monday morning, our sales people use this platform to see which clients looked at what topics in the past week, match that with projects they're working on, and the salesperson will then make sure they get the right advisor and call the client to assist. It helps us to be proactive, understand client priorities, change our research agenda, and know what our clients need to know. This granular visibility to what our clients need, often before the clients know what’s coming up, is a significant change on how we can retain our relevance in this highly competitive industry."

Dr. Joseph Sweeney
Industry Analyst, IBRS

About IBRS

IBRS, is an Australian advisory and consulting company. They work with technology and business leaders to ensure they make the most informed and qualified decisions to assist in their success. IBRS’s advice and guidance is based on an understanding of global trends, but more importantly, reflected in a deep knowledge of the Australian marketplace. Formed in 2002, IBRS has a broad client base across all industries. Through their advisory, assurance, and consulting practices, clients engage with IBRS advisors and are able to deal with the issues that are critical for them.

Challenges: Unified data blending and collaboration

Dr. Joseph Sweeney, an IBRS shareholder and industry advisor, was looking for a simple self service BI tool that integrates with the Zoho ecosystem, as well as third-party apps.

IBRS uses Zoho One, Zoho's suite of applications that includes software like Zoho CRM, Zoho Survey, Zoho Sales IQ, and more. They also have data in social media apps, like LinkedIn, and financial apps, like Xero. Sweeney was looking for a self-service BI platform that's simple and understands the relationships between data, to generate insights quickly.

Sweeney was using Microsoft Excel, but found it extremely limiting for doing advanced analysis. They were also using Power BI as another BI tool, but sharing across clients and advisors was a challenge.

 

IBRS wanted a solution that could:

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

"Power BI licensing is high. Also, there is no easy way to share the dashboard with people outside the organization, like our clients. The BI tool we needed had to be capable of integrating data from multiple systems to create stunning dashboards that could be shared seamlessly across teams and to our clients."

Dr. Joseph Sweeney
Industry Analyst, IBRS

Solution: Zoho Analytics, the perfect BI platform

IBRS, being a research and advisory organization, were using multiple BI tools, like Power BI, SPSS, and more. But IBRS was already a customer of Zoho One, which includes Zoho Analytics. They have their sales information in Zoho CRM, conduct surveys in Zoho Survey, and have information coming in from Zoho Survey and LinkedIn—but they were not all integrated into a single BI system. This prompted Sweeney to evaluate Zoho Analytics.

He liked the simplicity of the platform, the unified blending of data with multiple systems, and was impressed by its easy setup and sharing of reports and dashboards across multiple devices.

Things got interesting when Sweeney hosted a conference for IT leaders, where the participants needed to fill out a survey while signing in for the conference. This was the first time he tried Zoho Analytics and was impressed with the outcome. They reviewed 14 years of information and came out with key industry trends. Now, they're drawing info from this conference every year. Soon, Zoho Analytics became their go-to tool for day-to-day analytics.

In addition to above, the IBRS sales team also uses Zoho Analytics to better understand their client needs and the changing research agenda of their customers, which helps them proactively reach out to customers and sell advisory services.better understand their client needs and the changing research agenda of their customers, which helps them proactively reach out to customers and sell advisory services.

Sweeney also uses Zoho Analytics for his consulting needs.

The company uses the platform for:

  • Strategic consulting, to identify key industry trends, insights from research surveys, and more
  • Sales analysis, like websites customer visits, changing research priorities, and more

"The Unified Business Analytics feature is amazing in Zoho Analytics. I like the way data is integrated and blended from multiple systems—like CRM, Campaigns, LinkedIn, and SalesIQ—to churn out powerful insights on our customers. The second key feature is the data storytelling, where data is directly fed from Zoho Analytics into presentations. Finally, with the Zia Insights feature, I had a C-level executive client who was excited to see the interpretation it came up with. It gave him exactly what he wanted, and he could just copy and paste it, and it was done. According to my prediction, Zia Insights will become a very heavily used feature going forward."

IBRS also built a tool on Zoho Analytics for their clients to survey their staff satisfaction at work. They set up dashboards in Zoho Analytics and build services on top of the platform, which is shared with their clients. They also integrate with Zoho Campaigns to get 360degree visibility on trends.

Data storytelling, a feature that enables users to create dashboards in Zoho Show, is Sweeney's favorite. Now they have the same presentation setup every month, but the data changes because its seamlessly connected to ZA, without the need for fancy licensing. Another key feature worth noting is Zia Insights, which provides the ability to interpret graphs through machine learning, which is used by his C-level customers. He expects Zia Insights to be a heavily used feature in the future.

Other features like, supporting complex SQL scripts, beautiful visualizations, and drill down options, are notable features.

With Zoho Analytics, IBRS were able to understand client needs and offer the best advisory services—ones that are focused on their needs, enabling targeted marketing. This was critical to improving the bottom line for the company.

Since most of the analysis work is done through Zoho Analytics, the time taken for performing data analytics dropped by 3 days. Now it just takes a few seconds to perform analysis and get insights.

The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared through user-based access, with many users, including senior advisors and C-level executives of client teams, across devices, anytime, anywhere.

Benefits & results

  • Time saved to do analysis dropped from 3 days to seconds
  • Enabled granular visibility on clients through insights
  • Facilitated creation of insightful reports and dashboards
  • Enabled easy collaboration of reports across multiple devices, on the go.