From Data to Decisions: How Finance Helps Sales Manage Customer Profitability

In today’s fast-moving business environment, sales teams must do a lot more than just bag deals; they should aim for profitable growth. Hence, the volume of sales alone is not important, one must also consider factors like margin, cost of acquisition, and long-term value of customers. Hence, we must use financial metrics for sales decisions. Getting the sales data and bridging it with financial data is very slow and traditionally done manually. This is where Keboola steps in. Organizations can unify these data streams immediately. This gives an edge to those in sales with a trusted business lead to guide targeting, pricing, and customer strategies.

Many companies suffer from a common problem of  their sales teams that can operate with only CRM data. However, they do not take into account true cost and profitability of their deals. Therefore, it could cause stress with businesses pursuing high-revenue but low-margin customers. They fail to see who is really profitable. The data is also distributed across systems. Usually, the CRM is in one system, finance/ERP in another, and so on. Thus, reporting and sales profitability analysis analysis across the organization becomes inaccurate and time consuming. 

How do we overcome this hurdle? The separate data can cause delays, misalignment between sales and finance goals, and shows false growth without profitability. Sales forecasts may be misleading as we often tend to overlook overheads and customer servicing costs. Without integrated data, one cannot make any good predictions.

The best solution is to connect CRM and financial data. This is exactly where Keboola scores. Keboola's Financial Intelligence Solution is a cloud-based data integration platform that can consolidate data from CRM systems, databases, flat files, and more into a unified data warehouse.

It has got a modular architecture. Keboola allows non-IT and business teams to extract data from various sources, transform it, then feed it into analytics. This does not need significant technical expertise.

In practical terms, this means sales and finance can share a single source at one place: sales revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), service cost, recurring revenue. Sales teams can finally see how much profit each customer or segment brings. Thus, they can make better choices involving targeting, retention, and pricing.

Once CRM and financial data are unified, several key metrics should be accounted for to manage customer profitability:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): It means how much net value a customer is expected to bring over time; it is the revenue without costs, churn risk, servicing costs.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Payback: CAC Payback Period measures the time taken for a business to recover the investment made in acquiring new customers.
• Segment Margins: Segment margin is the profit produced by a single division or department of a business broken by customer type, product line, region, or acquisition channel. 
• Retention & Churn Costs: It is the cost to keep a customer of a service, support, delivery against the ongoing revenue.
• Cost-to-Serve & Cross-Sell/Upsell Revenue: Knowing the servicing costs and additional revenue helps gauge whether upselling or cross-selling to existing customers improves data-driven sales strategy.

With a unified data foundation from Keboola, these metrics can be computed and updated regularly. This helps sales and finance implement strategies that highlight finance and customer profitability.

One of the interesting examples of this integration is Home Credit International. They are a global consumer-finance provider operating across multiple countries. They faced a classic data challenge. The data were in different sources, inconsistent metrics, and slow consolidation across finance, risk, and sales teams as that work was done manually.

Then Keboola was deployed. Home Credit centralized data from ERP, CRM systems, and spreadsheets into a unified data platform, leading to a finance-sales collaboration. This improved data governance and security. 

The impact was great, and instant results were noted. Reporting that once took days was reduced to hours, giving management real-time visibility into financials. Thus, they could make strategic decisions. Finance and customer profitability management also became visible.

The best part was that this transformation wasn’t just technical. It also changed how teams thought about customers, focusing on profitability and strategic growth. 

By integrating CRM and financial data via Keboola, companies can break down silos and end reliance on slow manual reporting. Thus, both sales and finance can be empowered with an accurate view of finance and customer profitability.

With metrics like CLV, CAC payback, and segment margin made visible, sales teams can make smarter decisions. Keboola makes it possible with its integrative approach – where numbers do the talking; they are fast, accessible, and without any IT bottleneck.