Glo sales go data-driven with Zoho Analytics
- FOUNDED 2015
- countryUSA
- Industry Consumer Goods
- Size Small
- Employees 50+
- Presence USA
- Previous BI Tool Power BI, Tableau
- Data Sources QuickBooks, Cin7
- Analytics RequirementSales Analytics
- 10+Users
- 4-5 hrs/weekTime saved
- 2Datasources
"With Zoho Analytics, our sales members have customized dashboards to log in and see their performance and sales trends for the day, week, or month. That helps them digest all of the key information very easily and quickly. This is crucial for our sales team. Also, our whole management team is on Zoho Analytics, which includes our sales director, our VP of business development, myself, and other leaders from the accounting team."
Hagan Walker
Chief Executive Officer, Glo
About Glo
Glo established in 2015, is the overarching company for Glo Cubes®—liquid activated, light up drink cubes—and Glo Pals®—light up sensory toys for children. With headquarters based in Starkville, Mississippi, USA, they design, package, and distribute their products to customers in over 38 countries worldwide. Since inception, they’ve sold over 4 million products.
Challenges: Multiple applications, one BI tool
Hagan Walker, the CEO of Glo, wanted to be able to track the performance of his business.
Glo uses multiple systems—CIN7 as their inventory management system, and QuickBooks as their finance app. Walker was looking for an advanced BI platform that could integrate and blend data from all systems, and derive insights from them, thereby having more control over their business.
He was in need of an overall picture that would show the performance of his business end-to-end, and help him identify potential opportunities for his company.
Glo wanted a solution that could:
- Import and blend raw data from multiple applications
- Get actionable reports through reports and dashboards
- Provide collaborative analytics with user-based permissions
MS Excel had limited options
"Bringing all data sources together was the need. We had lots of data stored in Cin7 and QuickBooks, and we wanted one BI solution that could blend data from all our applications and provide insights out of it."
Hagan Walker
Chief Executive Officer, Glo
Solution: Sales analytics through Zoho Analytics
Glo was using Microsoft Excel to bring in data from all their applications for analysis, which took up lot of their time. Moreover, the output was inaccurate, with a high level of errors.
The company started looking for a BI solution and considered various options, including Power BI and Tableau, but decided Zoho Analytics was the ideal solution for them. They were quickly wowed by Zoho Analytics' seamless unified data blending capability with QuickBooks.
The integration between Zoho Analytics and QuickBooks was fast and seamless. They were able to integrate, blend, and generate reports, like the productivity levels of sales agents, sales reports, ad spends, and much more—comparing multiple aspects of the business, all in one place. The data from Cin7 is also imported into Zoho Analytics using an API integration.
Walker likes the user interface of Zoho Analytics, as well as features like the variety of data visualizations, filtering, ability to use queries to join tables, the formula engine, unified data blending, seamless data sync, collaboration, and interactive reports.
Glo used Zoho Analytics to create sales dashboards including:
- Agent performance metrics like sales run rate per agent, by product, by category, by region, by agent, and more
- Sales metrics, like monthly sales orders, previous day sales, order value with zip code, revenue trends, invoice generated trends, etc
Unified data blending is the key
"Zoho Analytics gave us more control over our business. Our sales orders are generated in Cin7 and invoices are pushed in to QuickBooks later on. We have to maintain parity between these two applications and Zoho Analytics helps us do that, as well through unified data blending. We are now able to view, track, and compare the sales vs invoices within Zoho Analytics, instead of going to two separate apps."
With Zoho Analytics, insights about the company's sales are communicated to each sales agent, where they can log in and see their performance and sales trends for that week or month. This was critical in determining performance and identifying weak areas for the sales team.
Since most of the analysis work is now done through Zoho Analytics, the company is saving 4-5 hours/week, which were previously spent on manually doing data analysis. Walker is also now able to easily visualize complex data in a very meaningful way.
The dashboards created with Zoho Analytics are shared with 10+ users, including senior management and finance heads.
Benefits & results
- Glo saves 4-5 hours/week using Zoho Analytics
- Enables visualization of complex data in very meaningful ways easily
- Provides insightful unified dashboards
- Facilitates end-to-end business insights.
4-5 hrs/week saved using Zoho Analytics