AI meets BI: Ask Zia for Sales Analytics

01.08.19 12:30 PM - By rogv1a33

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In our previous posts, we discussed how data analytics can help you optimize your sales execution. We also went into some of the key sales metrics every business owner needs to track to stay ahead of the game. In this post, we’re going to look at how Ask Zia, our AI-powered smart analytical assistant, can empower any user to do in-depth sales analytics.

In Zoho Analytics, you can ask Zia questions in natural language and get back insights in the form of reports and dashboards. Powered by NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine Learning), Zia understands your questions, your data model, and business-specific terms and conventions. Be it sales, marketing, finance, or support—Zia understands data from any domain, along with its business lingo, and relates it to build the most appropriate visualizations for the questions you ask.

Let’s see how we can extract powerful sales insights, in seconds, using Zia. You can ask questions in plain English, and Zia will give you meaningful insights in the form of visualizations.

Note: The examples demonstrated below are based on data from Zoho CRM.

Let’s start with a simple question:

  • Show me the total sales

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Zia has understood the question, fetched the amount column from the dealstable, and built a KPI widget to display the sales. The right-hand side panel in the interface displays how the visualization was constructed. Zia has also automatically generated a title and description for the widget.

Let’s go further and build our questions incrementally.

  • Show me the monthly sales

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The previous chart shows us the sales data for the entire period— “all-time” results. To see the sales for a specific period, let’s say 2018, all we need to do is tell Zia:

  • Show me the monthly sales in 2018

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We can see that Zia has understood the question and filtered only 2018.

We can even ask Zia for a specific chart type.

  • Show me the monthly sales in 2018 as a bar chart

Zia changes the line chart to a bar chart, still showing the sales across months.

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Let’s refine it further to view sales by locations.

  • Show me the monthly sales in 2018 by location 

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Since we asked for geographic information, Zia has now generated a geo-map chart, showing the sales by region.

Finally, let’s ask Zia to sort this data by industries.

  • Show me monthly sales in 2018 by location and industries

Zia has generated the best possible representation, which is a pivot table

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Reports thus generated can be saved or added to any dashboard right away, from Zia’s interface. 

It doesn’t end there though. Zia can relate different modules and even different domains. For example, if you use Zoho CRM and Zoho Books, you can ask Zia for cross-functional insights.

  • Total leads count, converted leads count, won deals count, and paid invoices count

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You can see that Zia has understood the underlying data model from two different apps, related the appropriate tables, and built a funnel chart for our question.

You can ask Zia anything about your business and uncover hidden insights:

  • Win rate by salespersons
  • This year vs last year revenue by country
  • Won deals count vs tickets count vs paid invoices by account name
  • Leads distribution across leads source as a pie chart
  • Won deals count vs tickets count by Account Name

This is just a glimpse of what Zia can do. Why not give a try and start exploring the possibilities for yourself?

76% of sales professionals say using sales analytics has significantly improved their ability to provide customers with a consistent experience across every channel
– State of Sales Report

Sales analytics holds the key to business success today—forget coding and working with complex report builders to analyze your data. Zia democratizes data analytics and enables anyone to transform their raw data into insights.

And Ask Zia isn’t just limited to Zoho CRM, you can analyze your data from many popular apps, like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot CRM, and more.

You don’t have to sort through piles of data to analyze your business anymore. With Zia, all you need to do is… ask!

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