Softbrain provides advanced analytics to sales customers with Amazon QuickSight

This is a guest post by Kenta Oda from SOFTBRAIN Co., Ltd.

In this post, we discuss how QuickSight is helping us provide our sales customers with the insights they need, and why we consider this business decision a win for Softbrain.

Softbrain is a leading Japanese producer of software for sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM). Our main product, e-Sales Manager (eSM), is an SFA/CRM tool that provides sales support to over 5,500 companies in Japan. We provide our sales customers with a one-stop source for information and visualization of sales activity, improving their efficiency and agility, which leads to greater business opportunity.

With increasing demand from our customers for analyzing data from different angles throughout the sales process, we needed an embedded analytics tool. We chose Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-native business intelligence (BI) tool that allows you to embed insightful analytics into any application with customized, interactive visuals and dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with eSM and is easy to use at a low cost.

There were four things we were looking for in an embedded analytics solution:

• Rich visualization – With our previous solution, which was built in-house, there were only four types of visuals, so it was difficult to combine multiple graphs for an in-depth analysis.
• Development speed – We needed to be able to quickly implement BI functionalities. QuickSight requires minimal development due to its serverless architecture, embedding, and API.
• Cost – We moved from Tableau to QuickSight because QuickSight allowed us to provide data analysis and visualizations to our customers at a competitive price—ensuring that more of our customers can afford it.
• Ease of use – QuickSight is cloud-based and has an intuitive UX for our sales customers to work with.

Innovating with QuickSight

Individual productivity must be greatly improved to keep up with the shifting labor market in Japan. At Softbrain, we aim to innovate using the latest technology to provide science-based insights into customer and sales interactions, enabling those who use eSM to be much more productive. Sales reps and managers are able to make informed decisions.

By using QuickSight as our embedded analytics solution, we can offer data visualizations at a much lower price point, making it much more accessible for our customers than we could with other BI solutions. When we combine the process management system offered by eSM with the intuitive user experience and rich visualization capability of QuickSight, we empower customers to understand their sales data, which sits in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Aurora, and act on it.

Seamless console embedding

What sets QuickSight apart from other BI tools is console embedding, which means our customers have the ability to build their own dashboards within eSM. They can choose which visualizations they want and take an in-depth look at their data. Sales strategy requires agility, and our customers need more than a fixed dashboard. QuickSight offers freedom and flexibility with console embedding.

Console embedding allows eSM to be a one-stop source for all the information sales reps and managers need. They can access all the analyses they need to make decisions right from their web browser because QuickSight is fully managed and serverless. With other BI solutions, the user would need to have the client application installed on their computer to create their own dashboards.

Empowering our sales customers

With insights from QuickSight embedded into eSM, sales reps can analyze the gap between their budget and actual revenue to build an action plan to fill the gap. They can use their dashboards to analyze data on a weekly and monthly basis. They can share this information at meetings and explore the data to figure out why there might be low attainment for certain customers. Our customers can use eSM and QuickSight to understand why win or loss opportunities are increasing. Managers can analyze and compare the performance of their sales reps to learn what high-performing reps are doing and help low performers. Sales reps can also evaluate their own performance.

Driving 95% customer retention rate

All of these insights come from putting sales data into eSM and QuickSight. It’s no secret that our customers love QuickSight. We can boast a 95% customer retention rate and offer QuickSight as an embedded BI solution at largest scale in Japan.

To learn more about how you can embed customized data visuals and interactive dashboards into any application, visit Amazon QuickSight Embedded.

About the author

Kenta Oda is the Chief Technology Officer at SOFTBRAIN Co., Ltd. He is in responsible of new product development with keen insight on better customer experience and go-to-market strategy.