Improving Sales & Marketing ROI

Companies are under continued pressure to do more with less, and business decision makers often need a deeper understanding of the return on investment (ROI) from their sales and marketing efforts. Unfortunately, many enterprises still analyze static data to gain insight into these metrics. A sales and marketing analytics solution based on the 2007 Microsoft Office system can enable better tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs), provide a deeper understanding of performance data, and facilitate more agile changes to strategy in response to market conditions.

Solution Showcase

On This Page
  Challenges
  Why Choose the Microsoft Office System?
  Microsoft Office System Products

Challenges

Many sales and marketing organizations face challenges in their analytics, including:

•	Inability to quickly access, modify, and gain insight from sales and marketing data
•	Inefficient data aggregation and analysis
•	Poor decision-making due to inflexible database reports
•	Less effective collaboration between sales and marketing departments

Why Choose the Microsoft Office System?

A sales and marketing analytics solution built using the 2007 Microsoft Office system provides the following benefits:

•	Simplified data access
•	Streamlined data analysis
•	Improved decision making
•	Effective collaboration

To address the challenges of sales and marketing analytics, it is crucial to choose a platform that is familiar to users, has deep development tools support, and a broad partner network. The Microsoft Office System is an ideal platform for a sales and marketing analytics solution because it provides the following benefits:

•	Has a network of experienced partners who help ensure successful deployment and integration.
•	Interoperates with other systems by using XML and Web Services. This helps ensure that the existing systems can integrate into the sales and marketing analytics process.
•	Already familiar to end users because companies of all sizes often prefer Microsoft Office system products and technologies, such as Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Outlook. This familiarity can help reduce training costs and ensure that workers can start using the solution quickly.
•	The platform deploys quickly with minimal IT impact, and so do solutions based on the Microsoft Office system.
•	Using familiar Microsoft products can reduce total cost of ownership.

Microsoft Office System Products

The 2007 Microsoft Office system is an integrated set of products, technologies, services, and solutions that enable customers to increase their organizational, team, and personal productivity. For a sales and marketing analytics solution, these components are often useful:

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office Word 2007

Microsoft Office Excel 2007

Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007