Do You Need a Data Warehouse or BI Tool for Revenue Operations?
This question comes up frequently, usually when a growing company starts feeling the pain of scattered data and someone suggests that a BI tool or data warehouse will solve the problem. Sometimes it will. More often, the investment is premature and the underlying problem is not a technology problem at all.
When You Do Not Need Them Yet
For most companies at the $5M-$20M stage, a BI tool or data warehouse is not the right next investment if any of the following are true:
- Your CRM data is not clean. A BI tool built on top of dirty CRM data will produce beautiful, misleading dashboards. Fix the foundation first.
- You do not have a single source of truth. If your team pulls the pipeline number from five different places and gets five different answers, adding a BI tool creates a sixth answer, not clarity.
- Your metric definitions are not agreed upon. BI tools automate the calculation of metrics. If the team has not agreed on how pipeline or conversion rate is calculated, the BI tool will calculate them consistently wrong.
- Your leadership team is not using the dashboard you already have. If existing reports are not being reviewed and acted upon, the problem is not the sophistication of the reporting, it is the review cadence and decision-making culture.
What You Need Instead
- A clean, well-maintained CRM that serves as the single source of truth for pipeline and sales data
- Written metric definitions the whole leadership team has agreed to
- A primary revenue dashboard with eight or fewer metrics
- A review cadence that gets the leadership team looking at the same data at the same time, regularly
When BI Tools Do Make Sense
- You have clean, reliable data in multiple systems and need to bring it together for analysis
- Your leadership team has consistently outgrown the reporting capabilities of your CRM
- You have a dedicated ops or data resource who can own the tool and maintain it
The Principle
Technology amplifies the quality of the foundation it sits on. A BI tool built on a strong data foundation is a force multiplier. A BI tool built on weak data is an expensive distraction. Invest in the foundation first.