LucidEra Announces Pipeline Insight 2.0

PRLog (Press Release) - Mar 17, 2009 -
LucidEra, the leader in software-as-a-service (SaaS) business intelligence, today announced LucidEra Pipeline Insight 2.0, the latest release of the company’s award-winning on-demand analytic application for sales. Pipeline Insight 2.0 introduces new prebuilt stage conversion metrics and dynamic best-practice reports that allow sales management and operations to analyze current and historical sales trends. Customers will be able to determine what percentage of deals at each stage of the pipeline ultimately convert to new business, project future results, and identify potential pipeline at risk. Today the company also announced two new offerings designed to make it even easier for salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM, http://www.salesforce.com) customers to get started with better sales analytics as a service.

LucidEra customers (http://www.lucidera.com/customers/case_studies.php) already rely on Pipeline Insight to identify the characteristics of the deals they’re most likely to win, measure the performance of their sales team, and track the velocity and changes to their sales pipeline over time. With Pipeline Insight 2.0, LucidEra extends a company’s ability to maximize sales productivity and results by providing interactive analysis of current and historical stage conversion ratios and cycle time trends. LucidEra Pipeline Insight 2.0 allows sales management and operations to drill into every aspect of their sales process in order to easily identify what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s changing so they can take corrective action.

“The addition of detailed stage conversion analysis will allow us to get a more complete picture of our sales funnel - how much pipeline is coming in, moving out, conversion rates, and monthly and quarterly trends,” said Kathy Lord, vice president of sales programs and operations at Intacct. “We’re able to dig into each stage of our sales process to see where the bottlenecks are and where we should be focusing our resources by industry, company size, and sales rep.”

Pipeline Insight 2.0 includes support for salesforce.com revenue schedules, which is becoming increasingly adopted by subscription-based product and services companies. Significant scheduling and flexibility enhancements have also been added to the built-in LucidSnapshot capabilities, which automatically create time-based snapshots of all opportunities in the sales pipeline making it easy to pinpoint changes between time periods.

“I strongly believe that sales will improve the moment sales managers make fewer decisions based on hunches and more decisions based on science,” said Gerhard Gschwandtner, Founder and Publisher, Selling Power magazine. “The historical analysis and insight that LucidEra delivers has a proven ability to transform your sales team into a metrics-driven sales organization and get you on the path to Sales 2.0.”

Two New LucidEra Offerings for Salesforce.com Customers
Today LucidEra also announced an innovative service offering: the LucidEra Quarterly Pipeline Healthcheck, which is like hiring business analysts as an on-demand service. Once a quarter, LucidEra will analyze your pipeline, sales people, and sales process and deliver in-depth insight covering the results of the analysis, what they mean, and what actions can be taken next.  These business analysis services can be purchased standalone or in conjunction with any LucidEra on-demand analytic application. Customers can now either use LucidEra to do their own in-house analysis of their sales and marketing effectiveness, or have LucidEra’s business consultants perform the analysis and interpret the results, or do both.

The company also introduced LucidEra Starter Edition, which is designed for smaller sales organizations looking to do more with less and focus their resources.
“We’re excited to be helping our customers continue to increase sales productivity through the use of the right sales metrics and analytics,” said Rob Reid, President and CEO of LucidEra. “Pipeline Insight 2.0 and these new offerings add depth and breadth to our SaaS analytics offerings and illustrate our continued focus on giving VPs of Sales and sales managers the business visibility they need to increase their results in these difficult economic times.”

Availability
LucidEra Pipeline Insight 2.0, the LucidEra Healthcheck quarterly service, and LucidEra Starter Edition are available today. For more information visit http://www.lucidera.com/application/pipeline_insight2_0.php.