If you’re tired of hearing about disruption, rejoice, it will soon be replaced by business intelligence (BI). The buzzword of 2017-18, the mention of BI may exceed everyone’s forecasts. Lucky for you, the BI phenomenon hasn’t reached its pinnacle… in fact, the groundswell just started in Canada.

Enterprises in the [Canadian] utility sector (50.9%) had the highest rate of adoption of advanced business intelligence technology, followed by the professional, scientific and technical services (39.6%) and wholesale trade (29.0%) sectors. (Stats Can, 2014 report)

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) technology derives insights from data sources like historical sales data, third-party data, operations information, and customer data. With deeper, more complete, and more reliable insights into a business, an owner/director, like you, has the information required to make better decisions.

But our data’s all over the place

That’s ok, you can still achieve a holistic view of your business. Intelligence platforms like Power BI connect easily to hundreds of data sources: sales & marketing, customer relationship management, and social listening platforms to name a few.

From sales to customer support, list all the ways your organization collects and stores data. You can unify that data—and combine it with third-party information—to make decisions with more confidence.

A new focus on customers

A holistic view of your data gives you the power to improve your customer’s experience with your brand, across all communication and service channels. With BI, you can realize the true value of your customer relationships. You can better understand what motivates your customers, then personalize their experience. The time of one-size-fits-all is over.

Personalized content & offers

If at first, you don’t succeed, try another offer. That’s what traditional marketers typically say. With the ability to see in real-time which offers to perform best, you can make quicker decisions, and serve the remaining customers the highest-performing offer.

Competing with larger competitors? You need more than an edge to win and keep the business. Business intelligence moves your game to the next level.

Make messages relevant

It’s common sense marketing… as you know more about your customer, personalize your communications. Align the content and offers to their needs and dreams. With BI, your team can access a powerful dashboard that brings all the data together into one analytical tool.

Plug in external data

Plug external data sources, like Facebook posts, into your dashboard to identify where and when to best reach your target audience. Unify your data sources (internal sources like sales, web analytics, and social listening) into one integrated hub like Microsoft’s Power BI. Just imagine how many times you can retell your story.

Optimize sales & marketing

The sales and marketing teams team love BI. It gives them reliable information, which they can use to create campaigns, perfect the elevator pitch, revise the company PowerPoint presentation, and inform their lead generation efforts.

How? With platforms like Dynamics CRM, your salespeople can get to know customers better. They can nurture them cost-effectively by utilizing the content developed by marketing and spending more time closing deals.

Focus your marketing

Building a content library suitable for sales to share with customers helps your business zero in quickly on the messaging that works with your target audience. No need to use the shotgun approach anymore. Dial up the effectiveness of your salesforce with a truly scalable CRM and business intelligence platform.

Get the ebook

Let Microsoft Power BI help you interpret, present, and act on business data. In this e-book, you’ll learn about how Office 365 and Power BI can work for your team. Includes 10 things you can do in your first 10 minutes with Power BI! (Requires registration) Download here.

This article is part of a series written by Microsoft in partnership with Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada.