Overwhelmed by Data

A Private Equity firm had nine offices in multiple countries, managing billions of dollars of assets. When dealing with financials and investments, you can imagine how much data is out there. They specifically wanted to make their business development processes more efficient, and to do this they needed deeper insights into their business lines.

While they had access to massive amounts of data through Salesforce, it often felt like drinking from a firehose. They wanted a better way to make sense of the data so they could easily identify actionable and meaningful insights.

Embracing Innovation

The company has over 40 years of experience in the global private markets investments industry – imagine all of the changes it had collectively witnessed over four decades! The leaders at this company had understood the importance of evolving and embracing innovation. They were tired of doing everything manually; they recognized that if they could digitize their analytics, it could transform their current challenges into opportunities.

This wasn’t something their mid-size firm could handle on their own. Their resources were stretched and they could only dedicate a single person to oversee the project. Looking for assistance, the firm reached out to Tableau who connected them to BDO Digital as a leading Tableau Managed Partner to help identify their specific goals before making recommendations.

Ultimately, they wanted to:

• Understand their customer needs and client interaction by segmentation
• Close more sales by becoming more efficient through maximizing exposure to operations funnel pipeline
• Improve cashflow
• Reduce other financial carrying costs
• Improve relationships with customers

Clearly understanding the firm’s goals helped BDO Digital’s Data Analytic team narrow down the appropriate information to target. The next challenge was how to organize it in a way that made sense.

Partnering with Data Analytic Leaders

BDO Digital set out to create a business development dashboard that would compile and organize the right data that could be used to answer the company’s questions in real time. BDO Digital’s Data Architects began by conducting a data profiling dive and reviewing the company’s massive data sets captured by their CRM, Salesforce. They then gathered the business requirements that aligned with the company’s overall goals and decided which of the millions of pieces of data would be the most useful. BDO Digital’s team was then able to build dashboards in Tableau to visualize this info, which could then be used to improve decision making by the company’s sales and marketing teams. The project was finished under budget and in less than one month.

The company is now able to more efficiently act on insights gleaned from their metrics and target the right areas for business development. They also saw improved relationships with their customers with enhanced reporting and improved communications. By becoming a data-driven company, the firm is targeting the right areas for business development and driving more sales toward their bottom line.

Did you know only 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and put to use? What could your organization accomplish by unlocking the power of data that exists? If you’d like to learn more about how your organization can gain competitive advantage by being one of the innovators that does, contact us to learn more about Data Analytics.