Join Us This Month For A PowerPivot and Data Analysis Expression (DAX) Webinar

Happy new month!

This month we'll be hosting a webinar on Excel's revolutionary PowerPivot and DAX (the functions you use in PowerPivot). You can register here: Webinar Sign Up Form

PowerPivot is Excel's powerful tool for analyzing big data and it can connect to a lot of popular data sources: Access, Microsoft SQL server, Oracle Database, Teradata, Informix, IBM DB2, Sybase, MySQL (via ODBC), Excel files and text files.

We currently use PowerPivot for a project we consult on for a big telecoms company. It allows us to easily analyse millions of rows of data easily and make lots of deep insight reports. We are able to explore relationships between different data sources and make rich reports that would have been impossible with other common data analysis software.

In the coming webinar, we will show you how to enable PowerPivot in Excel 2013 (provided your license version of Excel has it) and how to set it up to import the data you want to analyze. We will also show you how to make new columns from the columns in the originally imported data. They are called Calculated Columns.

We will introduce Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). They are the formulas you'd use in PowerPivot. They are more like modified Excel formulas but just structurally different. We will, in our usual easy to understand way, demystify DAX. We will work through some common DAX functions.

Best of all, we will have all your questions on PowerPivot and it's practical use answered.

Don't forget to sign up: Webinar Sign Up Form

A Quick Demonstration Of How To Use Microsoft Power BI

I hope you have signed up for our upcoming Power BI demonstration webinar where you can get all your questions answered and see a live demonstration. Register for the Webinar.

Today, I'll show you a demonstration of how to use Power BI. First you'll need to sign up, download and install the Power BI designer. Just head over to www.powerbi.com

You'll get an email with the download link of the Power BI designer. Download and install it. Then launch it.

Once it's done loading, click on Get Data. I am going to demonstrate using it with Google Analytics to monitor your blog or website performance.

You'll get a list of data sources you can connect to. If you scroll down you'll see Google Analytics and even Facebook. But for this demonstration, it's Google Analytics we'll use.

Then you'll have to supply your Google Analytics account login details to authorize Power BI to connect to your Google Analytics account. I have already done that and forgot to take a snapshot; now that I want to take a snapshot I am unable to redo it. But if your login and authorization is successful you will see a list of all the websites you track on Google Analytics.

I have my Google Analytics account connected to five websites, but for this demonstration I pick my blog -- olafusimichael.com

I add the metrics I want to track: Pageviews, Sessions, Country, Bounce rate, Date, Keywords, Source and a few other metrics. Then I load them into Power BI.

I click on Report in the lower left corner to begin creating my visual analysis. I drag the metrics I want to visualize into the report page and set the type of visualization (chart, map, table or slicer). Below is what I created.

I then save the design.

Again, I go to www.powerbi.com but to sign in. I need to upload my design so I can have access to it on my PC, smartphone, tablets and any internet connected device.

I log in with the email and password I created when I signed up. And I am taken to the online dashboard where I will upload the report I created with the Power BI designer by clicking Get Data at the lower left corner.

Once I am done uploading. I will see the report I created.

And I can put some of the metrics in a summary dashboard by pinning them.

This is what my Dashboard looks like after pinning the metrics I am most interested in.

Finally, you can set the frequency of updates/refresh the dashboard should make to the underlying dataset (Google Analytics in this case).

Now you have a dashboard that is updated automatically daily and can be accessed from any PC, smartphone or tablet. It can also be shared.

Go ahead and install Power BI on your smartphone (I think only iPhone and Windows phone for now). Sign in with your account and you see your dashboard.

If you tap on a metric, you can set an alert point. Maybe you want to be alerted when a particular metric reaches a specific value. In this example, I might want to be alerted on any day my pageviews exceed 10,000.

And that's a quick demonstration of how to use Microsoft Power BI. Don't forget to sign up for our webinar coming up this Thursday, Sign Up for The Webinar

Power BI Webinar. Learn Business Intelligence The Easy Way.

Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence dashboard tool.

And in Microsoft's word here, the benefits are:

1. Market smarter

Are you overwhelmed by data from all the different tools you use? Is it time-consuming to access and analyze all that information together? Make it simple: with Power BI, you can easily monitor and analyze your marketing campaigns and efficiently allocate your resources to the right channels, all in one place.

2. Monitor your campaign

Is your campaign effective? How are your marketing tactics performing? Dive deep and analyze performance by specific products and market segments to find the actions that lead to retention, upsell, or cross-sell opportunities.

3. Talk to the right customers

Want to target your most profitable customers? How can you easily position your campaigns to produce the greatest ROI? Segment your customers based on geographic buying behavior, demographic filters, customer lifetime values, activations, and churn.

4. Crush your quota

Want to forecast sales better, hit that record sales target, and increase profitability per sale? If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com, Power BI extends and enhances these services with instant insight into your pipeline. Track key metrics like conversion rate, pipeline value, and win rate by getting a holistic picture of your customer pipeline from initial contact to successful closure.

5. Sales management

Want at-a-glance insights into your team's key metrics and the ability to quickly drill down for more details? Power BI creates these dashboards in seconds, bringing your company's sales pipeline under a magnifying glass. Explore the stages in your sales process — what can you learn from the successful deals your team has closed?

6. Sales representative

What can you learn from your biggest sales? Do you outperform certain opportunities, but leave others open? Understand how your previous deals performed so you can execute on future deals more efficiently.

7. Win together

How successful are your customers with your product? Want to track the impact of your customer support on brand loyalty? As part of the customer support team, your day is full of win-win opportunities. By successfully resolving support tickets, you and your team are strengthening customer loyalty and helping customers get more done. With Power BI you can analyze your closed cases, track every customer engagement, and continue to deliver world-class support.

8. Give the five-star treatment

Want to help your team hit their customer satisfaction goals? As a customer support manager, you need to ensure your team is helping customers succeed every time. In a single view, understand how waiting in a queue affects call ratings, who's resolving tickets most efficiently, and which channel has the highest incident volume.

9. See the bigger picture

How does your work contribute to your customers' success? Monitor your performance and how it impacts your team's bottom line. Talk your customers' language by understanding their problems and see your brand loyalty soar.

10. Monitor the pulse of your business

Do you want a holistic view of all your important information in a single place? Is your data spread across various sources like Excel spreadsheets, web analytics, databases, and CRM systems? With Power BI, you can bring all your data together and create personalized dashboards in seconds. Make the right data-driven decisions with your key business metrics.

11. Explore and analyze

Wish there was an easier, more interactive way to find data insights? Power BI lets you use simple drag-and-drop gestures to find trends, correlations, and outliers in your data. You can pose questions about your data using everyday language and get answers in the form of stunning interactive reports and charts.

12. Keep your team on the same page

Does your team find it hard to collaborate, especially when everyone is working with different versions of the same data? In just a few clicks, Power BI lets you share your dashboards—so you and your team can get a single view of the business and make decisions based on shared data insights.

You can download the Power BI for free here.

We will be giving a Power BI demonstration, showing you how you can become the magician at your company and be on top of the reports that matter to you and the management using Power BI. Also we will be answering your questions. It will be a one hour webinar.

Date: Thursday, June 25 2015

Time: 3:00 pm

Duration: 1 hour

You can reserve a slot for the webinar by emailing powerbi@urbizedge,com  or signing up here, Webinar Signup Form.

Monitoring Your Social Media Marketing Impact and ROI

Social media is increasingly becoming a platform of choice in building a reputable brand and a strong influence. It is a family of websites and applications that enable users to create and share content they find interesting and build an online community. It started as a way of helping individuals build a social network but businesses now use it to connect with their customers and reach new markets.

The major social media sites are:

1. Blogs
2. Facebook
3. Twitter
4. YouTube
5. LinkedIn
6. Google+
7. Instagram
8. Pinterest
9. Tumblr
10. Vine

Of the ten major social media sites the first five – Blogs, Facebook, Twitter , YouTube and LinkedIn – are most popular with businesses and professionals seeking to build their brand and grow their influence in their targeted market.

Active users on the major social media sites (March 2015)

According to Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Marketing report that surveyed over 2800 marketers worldwide on how they use social media to grow and promote their businesses:

1. 92% indicated that social media plays a vital role in their business growth and promotion strategy,
2. 68% use blogging to create an active community around their brand and build customer loyalty
3. 28% are planning on using more of podcasting to reach new markets
4. Facebook and LinkedIn were voted the two most important social networks for growing businesses,
5. Original and value-packed content are the most important piece of growing a business’ online reputation

The report also revealed that having an active social media presence leads to increased exposure for the business and help build a loyal fan base.

Benefits of social media marketing (>2800 respondents)


Our Solution

We provide big brands a human made comprehensive report of their social media strategy and influence. It is different from software generated mass-produced reports that most other providers provide. Our solution is by a leading expert with the industry knowledge and Nigerian social media trend knowledge that he brings to bear in giving your company a very in-depth personalized report that shows how well your social media strategy is doing compared to industry average, the detailed analytics of your social media activities and relevant recommendations.

Currently, we only provide this service for companies with an already active and well managed social media marketing. If you meet this requirement, you can email dashboard@urbizedge.com

Getting Your Business Numbers Right

A lot of entrepreneurs only bother about their detailed business numbers and financials when they need a bank loan or an external fund. They seldom see the need to be on top of their business numbers at all time.

In today's special post, I will show you the business numbers that matter a lot and that you have to get right always.

image: pulse-software.co.uk

1. Operating Profit
If you have ever looked through a financial statement or had to make a detailed financial plan, then you would have come across the words COGS and SGA. COGS stands for cost of goods sold. If your are in the manufacturing industry and you buy N5,000 worth of raw materials to make each unit of your finished product. Your COGS is N5,000 per unit product sold. SGA stands for selling, general and administration. If it costs you N1000 to get each product to a buying customer (this will usually include the costs of advertisement, company administration, payroll and other general expenses that can't be classified under COGS) then your SGA is N1000.

Usually, you can't influence your COGS (much). The price of your raw materials are outside your control and often the maximum you can do is to negotiate for a discount. But you can always influence your SGA. In the case of the manufacturing company above, you spend N1,000 to make a sale. The only way your company can grow is if you are able to make enough gross profit to cover this cost. You will have to sell your finished product for above N6,000 or bring down your SGA cost (but still sell well above N5,000). Otherwise, you'll soon be out of business.

The trouble is most businesses don't compute their actual SGA. They often deduct the COGS from revenue to compute profit, but that is called gross profit, not operating profit. Operating profit is Revenue - (COGS + SGA). They only look at their company bank statements to make estimates of operating profit.

If you are a small business, I will recommend you use QuickBooks to track all your expenses and compute your SGA.

2. Cost of Acquiring a New Customer
This is the amount you spend to convince someone in your market to buy your product/service and become a customer. It will involve cost of marketing, incentives/promo and research. This business metric is very valuable. It helps you to properly consider if a new market or a particular customer is worth the cost. Not all customers are equal. If you know your current cost of acquiring a customer, then you will know when to stop spending to get a particular customer. You will be able to avoid spending too much on one customer to the detriment of other customers you could acquire for less.

3. Customer Lifetime Value
Once you're in business for a considerable length of time, a pattern begins to form. You'll begin to notice that some customers keep buying your product/service and some only buy once. One metric you should begin to compute when that pattern seems steady is your customer lifetime value. It is the net profit you make from your average customer. And it is also the upper limit to the amount you can spend to acquire a new customer. 

Every one of your marketing strategy, especially promo, should be built with this number in mind.

4. Inventory Turnover
This is the ratio of your sales to inventory. It is practically the number of times your inventory is sold in a specific time period (usually a year). If you have a stock of N1 billion naira inventory but only manage to sell N10 million naira, then something is wrong. You are incurring a lot of inventory storage cost and the risk of having an obsolete inventory. You should reduce your inventory to less than N50 million naira at a time so you can have enough for your sales and not too much to incur unnecessary costs and risks.

And if you sell perishable goods or seasonal goods, you should keep the ratio close to one. 


Depending on the size and type of your business there are several other business numbers you need to get right.

To your success!

Do You Have A Sales Strategy?

Every business needs a sales strategy.
A sales strategy is your detailed plan of whom to sell to, how to get them and how to ensure they keep buying. It centers around customer acquisition, customer retention and revenue growth.

All businesses have sales people, even if it's just one person (the founder), but not all businesses have a sales plan. Most businesses are yet to realize the need for having on paper a detailed plan of how they will acquire customers, retain them and grow revenue. A lot of businesses have salesmen who are simply saddled with the task of meeting a sales target. No in-house thought out strategy for the long term. The sales team ends up engaging in short term unfocused strategies that damage the company's long term profitability and brand.

So, do you have a sales strategy?

If you don't have one, then it's time you made one. And we will help you with the process. 

image: expertiseinresults.com

Identify Your Market
A Sales strategy is built entirely on your deep accurate knowledge of your targeted market. You have to know:

1. The size of your targeted market. How many potential customers are there, how much they can afford to spend on your product and who are your competitors.
2. The selling points of your competition. How they convince the people in your targeted market to buy their products.
3. The dissatisfaction or pain points of your targeted market. What your competition is not doing right.
4. The spread of your targeted market. Do they all reside in one geographic region or are they spread across multiple geographic regions. What is it that uniquely binds them.

Craft Your Sales Goal

Now that you know your market and the competition you are up against, you should set yourself a reasonable sales goal. Make it detailed and not just something as vague as "N100 million in 1 year". Break it down to N200,000 a week by selling 10,000 units of your N20 product every week. 

A sales goal must be broken down to daily sales if your type of business allows it. You should be able to tie it to a specific number of sales, at least, per month.

Have a Plan For Reaching The Goal

Now that you have a sales goal, you need to make an elaborate plan that will help you reach the goal. This is where you'll need your CRM data (we talked about CRM last week). You need the details of how many customers you have to pitch to make one sale, and how long it takes you to make that one sale. If you to talk to 10 people to make 1 sale and 1 week to finalize that sale, then you will know that you'll need to talk to 1000 people to make 100 sales. And if you can only talk to 100 people in a week, you should know that it will take you 10 weeks to talk to 1000 people. So it will take you about 10 weeks to make 100 sales. 

Doing this sort of analysis will help you figure out if you need to expand your sales team or review your sales goal.

Implement and Track Your Success 

This is the last stage of building a sales strategy. You have made your sales goal, what is left is to implement the plan and track your success.

Have daily and weekly trackers that show you how you are faring. Include your goal as a benchmark in your CRM software. Have a dashboard that shows you a visual of sales activities against your goals. And keep reviewing the sales strategy. Always be ahead in your chosen market, update your sales goal, keep fine tuning your sales plan and find cheaper effective ways to implement your plans. You should aim to constantly reduce your cost of acquiring a new customer.

If you need further help, especially with building effective and professional trackers and dashboards, you can always contact us.

To your success!

Knowing Your Customers

There is one fact you need to know, whether you own a business or intend to start a business someday, and it is that one thing that can make your business thrive -- Customers are everything.

You could have a great business solution, a revolutionary company, a superior product or meeting a unique need. If no one buys your product or service, your business won't thrive. Your customer is more important than your product. Your product should keep evolving with your customer needs and preferences. So the most important business investment you can make is to invest in knowing your customer.

image: fortheloveofmarketing.com

Don't let all the customer data you get be their names and the other sales data you get while creating an invoice or sales report. You need to know what they think about your product, the unique ways they use your product, their expectations and what they would like to see you improve on. Don't be like the banks and just pile up bio-data of your customers. What you should be gathering is their interactions with your product, the needs they want your product to meet and their suggestions of how you can improve your products.

In every business, the customer is the king, whether you treat them like king or not.  But you are better off treating them well from the start than trying to re-win their patronage when they discover someone else who is treating them better. And to treat your customer well you need to understand the customer. You need to interact with them beyond the sales closure. You need to have a system that helps your know your customer better, track their activities and initiate a two-way communication between you two. You need a CRM.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. And a CRM software helps you automate and make strategic use of customer relationship data. Regardless of the business you run, you need it. In UrBizEdge we use BaseCRM. It's a fantastic CRM that fits our need. We've tried a couple of CRMs and decided BaseCRM worked great for our small team. It tracks our customer phone calls and collects a summary of each call discussion. Tracks our leads and handle the funneling from lead to prospective customer and a purchasing customer, and other recurring deals and opportunities. It tracks our email correspondence with our customers and help us keep in touch with everyone. It helps document relevant data about leads, prospects, customers, deals in the pipe and sales made. Best of all, you could automate keeping in touch with your customers, auto reminders.

For your business you might need a bigger CRM solution, like Microsoft Dynamics. But the bottomline is you need to know your customers well, even before they make a purchase (when they were simply leads). And you need to be in  constant touch with them.

If you need extra free advice on which CRM software will suite your company, you can always reach us at info@urbizedge.com

To your success!