5 reasons to combine CRM reporting with BI tool

BI tools offer several benefits to CRM reporting, such as reports that are fully customizable to the organization's needs, the ability to build custom metrics and combine data from multiple sources.

Why integrate a CRM system into Business Intelligence (BI), even though the CRM system already produces analytics on its own? BI tools offer several benefits to CRM reporting, such as reports that are fully customizable to the organization's needs, the ability to build custom metrics and combine data from multiple sources.

CRM systems often provide some reporting capabilities. However, their reporting capabilities usually do not fully meet the reporting needs of organizations. Integrating a CRM system with a BI tool easily provides additional depth and individuality for reporting. Nowadays, it is also possible to integrate CRM reporting with a BI tool relatively low cost. In this article, we’ll cover why you should integrate CRM reporting with a BI tool.

Customize CRM reports to your needs with the BI tool

BI tools allow you to build different reports in minutes for different audiences. With the help of BI tools, you can quickly create, for example, various reports for the company's management and individual salespeople. For example, you can give individual sellers reports that show only sales statistics for them. One of the most significant benefits of BI tools is presenting data with easy-to read-visuals instead of numbers. The reports and visuals can be easily edited with a few clicks as you like. Learn more about editing and customizing BI reports, for example, with the BI Book reporting tool.

Build customized metrics for CRM reporting

CRM systems offer reporting capabilities, but the metrics they contain are usually standard metrics that can't be customized for specific needs. By combining CRM reporting with a BI tool, it is possible to build different metrics to meet the needs of a particular organization.

With the help of BI tools, you can easily make different variations of the metrics, such as rolling averages. BI tools can also effectively filter out, for example, different deals under any selected criteria. Indeed, one of the biggest benefits of BI tools in CRM reporting is that the metrics can be varied and assembled in the desired ways for reports.

Combine data from different systems

BI tools allow it to retrieve reportable data from different business systems and combine it into unified reports. With the help of BI tools, such as BI Book, CRM data can be, e.g., combined with ledger and economic, production and marketing data. This helps to outline the big picture and how different areas of the business interact.

Avoid purchasing user licenses for CRM systems

In many cases, licenses for CRM systems can be expensive and need to be obtained for anyone who wants to see reports on a CRM system. The CRM system itself is often only actively used by sales and marketing teams. By integrating the BI tool with your CRM system, you no longer need to purchase user licenses for those executives who only need reports from CRM systems. BI tools make it easy to share and manage reports. Learn more about how the BI Book reporting tool makes it easy to share and manage all the reports in your organization.

Effectively identify shortages in CRM data

Combining CRM reporting with a BI tool quickly indicates any gaps in the data being reported. BI tools also help detect if people fail to update information. BI tools guide organizations to a data-driven culture and encourage people to ensure that CRM information is always updated. It, in turn, enables reliable comparison of CRM data over time and between different sellers and customers.

High-quality and up-to-date data also help to develop customer relationship management processes and make decisions that you can justify based on data. Often, when using BI tools, you also learn how to improve your CRM configuration to measure the things you want.

Integrate CRM reporting with the BI tool today

The BI Book reporting tool provides an easy way to integrate CRM reporting with Power BI and other BI tools. Book a free BI Book demo, and let's discuss how to boost your reporting with BI Book. When booking the demo, please tell us which systems you are using. Book a demo here.

An example CRM report with BI Book:

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