“Our senses can be trusted but they can easily be fooled”, Aristotle said in 350 BC. Although it was said thousand of years ago, recognizing that our brains do not always make the rigt call is more relevant than ever. Do you trust your cognitive ability to quickly assimilate big volumes of data to make accurate decisions?

In today’s big data environment, sales managers face a high risk of being fooled by their brains. Shifts in customers’ buying behavior and technological progress have given rise to an explosion of available data.

Having lots of data, on the surface appears to be a positive development. However, our ability to make rational and accurate decisions from large amounts of data is limited. The volume of data often exceeds leaders’ ability to assimilate and use it productively. To deal with this challenge, sales managers are seeking new ways to capture, process and visualize huge amounts of data – they engage in what we call sales analytics.

In recent years, sales organizations have recognized that what the organization knows and how it applies that knowledge to solve business problems makes a difference. However, it is not yet clear what constitutes best practice in sales analytics. Nor what distinguishes top performers from the rest.

In this white paper, we present findings from research on best practices in sales analytics in Nordic companies. Nordic Sales Analytics Study 2015 was performed in collaboration with Qlik and is the first compre- hensive study of sales analytics in the Nordic region.