Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced a new version of Birst for Sales Analytics. Building upon its rich heritage as a pioneer for next generation analytics solutions and marking an industry first, Birst is delivering deep predictive analytics into sales performance and the flexibility to combine sales force automation (SFA) data with other data sources. The new predictive capability uses historical data to model and predict the behavior of an organization’s sales pipeline and sales opportunities. In addition, the new release provides tighter integration with SFA applications. Specific to Salesforce.com, the new release delivers in-context analytics and collaboration capabilities via Chatter for more actionable business insights. Birst for Sales Analytics supports all leading SFA applications, including Salesforce.com, Siebel, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM and NetSuite.
The new predictive analytic capabilities derive deeper and more actionable insights into sales performance than previously possible. Birst is the first vendor to go beyond views of historical insights by leveraging historical data to predict future sales performance. Birst for Sales Analytics predicts sales pipeline movements and identifies sales opportunities that are at risk of getting lost. Birst for Sales Analytics offers tight integration with the Sales Cloud from Salesforce.com, the industry’s leading SFA application. New integration options deliver users a seamless and collaborative experience that is insightful, informed and impactful across the entire organization. In addition to allowing users to share Birst insights via Salesforce Chatter, Birst takes advantage of the VisualForce framework to embed visualizations and report tables directly into Salesforce.com screens like Opportunity or Account.
“Birst is raising the bar for what Sales Analytics can do for an organization,” said Birst CEO and co-founder Brad Peters. “Sales Analytics today is similar to looking in the rearview mirror and telling an organization what has already happened. Our new predictive capabilities give management and business analysts the ability to look through the windshield and see what is ahead, providing the ability to better plan and make better, more informed business decisions.”
Unlike other Sales Analytics applications that provide rigid and narrowly focused capabilities, Birst for Sales Analytics is designed for flexibility and extensibility. Every organization has unique sales processes specific to its industry and customers, with multiple operational systems supporting these processes. However, existing sales analytics solutions are inflexible and too narrowly focused on a specific SFA application and its data to fully unlock insights into sales performance across an entire organization. Lack of time series and trend analysis on snapshots of data over time limits the richness of analytical insights. Birst for Sales Analytics uniquely solves these challenges by providing a complete data warehouse that enables answers to the most sophisticated analytical questions posed by complex sets of data spanning multiple disparate data sources.
“Sales analytics delivers significant benefits by helping sales management more effectively recognize, understand and respond to emerging developments in sales cycles and markets, as well as improves overall sales planning and decision making regarding the deployment of resources,” said Patrick Stakenas, Gartner Research Director. “Most CRM suite vendors provide integrated sales reporting tools; however, the degree of functionality is generally limited compared to functionality of a sales analytics vendor.”
To learn more about Birst for Sales Analytics and its new predictive capabilities and integration options, join Birst for a webinar on January 10, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT titled, “Look Forward with Predictive Sales Analytics.” Register at http://bir.st/SFAwebinar.
