What is Power BI? An Introduction

BI is a bit of a buzzword these days, but why should you care? "BI" stands for "Business Intelligence;" the study of performing data analysis with business data. Using tools like Power BI, we can dive deeper into analyzing business data and visualizing the results. Power BI is included in Office 365 meaning it's available to every user. No matter your role, you need to know how to use this powerful tool.

Track Goals in Power BI with Constant Lines

Many of our clients want to track a metric over time against a goal using Power BI.  Let's take a look at how to add a Goal Line to your bar charts in Power BI for this purpose.

Team Goals: 3 Things You Didn’t Know

Most goals are doomed to fail. Here’s why - and how you can transform struggles into successes.

Gotchas When Using Power Query to Retrieve Dynamics CRM Data – Part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of my review of tips and gotchas for using Power Query with Dynamics CRM OData feeds. Let’s continue our review and talk about how ugly the option set numeric values are, and how you can improve your query times by tweaking (filtering more specifically) the OData URL used in Power Query.

Gotchas When Using Power Query to Retrieve Dynamics CRM Data – Part 1

If you have been following the Excel business intelligence space lately, you are familiar with all of the slick add-ins Microsoft has introduced with Power Query, Power Pivot and Power Map.  We work with a lot of Dynamics CRM clients, and I recently set out to use some CRM Online data to create some visualizations and dashboards in Excel.  I encountered a few different situations I had to deal with, so in this post I want to walk you through some of the gotchas I found when you use Dynamics CRM data with Power Query. 

Lead Scoring – Other Ways to Use Scoring – Part 4 of 4

Lead Scoring – Collaborate with Sales for More Impact – Part 3 of 4

Scoring leads is a great way to make sure that your sales team is working the leads that show the highest propensity of becoming a customer.    This is an ideal area where your marketing, sales and analytical people can collaborate to create something that helps everyone to be more successful.

Lead Scoring – The Scoring Options – Part 2 of 4

Marketing: Why won’t the salespeople work our leads?

Sales: Why won’t the marketing people give us good leads?

Sound familiar?  Part of the answer to this age-old dilemma is lead scoring.  In this post, let’s dive into the different options for lead scoring.

Lead Scoring – Convert Hot Leads to Customers – Part 1 of 4

You may already know that about 80% of the leads that your organization invests thousands of dollars to generate are never worked by your sales team.  But do you know why?  It’s because 98% of the leads you generate … stink.

And your sales team has no way of knowing which 2% of the leads are worth following up.  So it’s easier for them to work on the deals that are already in the pipeline and work with their networking contacts to generate referrals that are almost always more qualified than those danged marketing leads.

So how do you help your sales team find the gold nuggets buried in that mountain of leads?

Simplifying BI: Sharing Our Experiences & 3 Steps to Build Something Meaningful TODAY

The primary reason for this blog post is to share what our experience (aka the real world) has taught us on how to practically implement Business Intelligence (BI) for our clients. I’ll do my best to keep this short-and-sweet, because in all honesty there’s plenty to say on this topic, and enough BI buzzwords and statistics to confuse the entire island of Manhattan!