AI-Powered Sales Analytics: Inside Performio’s Analytics Studio

AI is all the rage…whilst being completely terrifying depending on who you talk to. ChatGPT, MidJourney, Grok, Google. Everybody’s in the game. What’s the next enhancement to create the latest deep fakes and automated designs to confuse reality or make a couple short cuts for efficiency’s sake? AI is as much of a buzzword as it is true artificial intelligence. Just because it says AI, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useful. At Performio, we’ve decided to amp up our Analytics Studio for faster and more efficient reporting and visualizations that can, at times, make it feel like you’ve got thousands of analysts right at your fingertips. 

Since its release, Performio’s Analytics Studio has given sales leaders, executives, sales comp admins, and sales reps access to crucial insights from their sales data, allowing them to analyze their teams’ performance, identify trends, optimize their incentive compensation plans, and much more. 

Now we’re harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to give you even greater functionality and a more intuitive experience than ever before. You’ll be able to instantly generate visual and interactive reports, create flexible dashboards, aggregate your data, identify trends and outliers, understand the causal factors behind those trends, and ensure that your commission plans are as effective as possible.

This is all possible thanks to new AI-powered functions we’ve recently added to Analytics Studio. Here’s how these features leverage AI to simplify sales compensation reporting, generate insights, and streamline data analysis.

Natural language reporting 

By now you’ve surely seen (and likely tried for yourself) how you can talk to NLP tools like ChatGPT as though they were human, and the AI can understand and respond. But the problem is that ChatGPT only has access to general knowledge, and it tends to make stuff up when it lacks specific expertise for a given question.

We’ve taken the power of natural language processing and combined it with the rigorous accuracy of Performio’s data sets to give you the best of both worlds without the drawbacks.

Creating reports is now as simple as asking for the data you need to see. For example, type in, “How does my sales team perform based on their commission payable?” and in seconds the software will generate a graph that compares the total actual performance and payables of the sales team.

Or you could say, “Show me the participant payables based on their attainment,” and Analytics Studio will provide the appropriate data graphed onto a scatter plot. You can even shorten that to “participant payables based on attainment.”

But maybe a scatter plot wasn’t the type of chart you were looking for. You can specify additional parameters to have your data presented in whatever format you need, and you can further train the model to help it learn your preferences—so it more consistently gives you what you’re looking for the first time.

And you can customize access to this functionality to grant personalized views and permissions based on specific users or roles. That way everyone has access to exactly what they need, without access to anything they don’t.

Automatic insights

Generating data visualizations by asking for them in natural language is groundbreaking, but what about the times when you don’t quite know what to ask for? You almost certainly have invaluable insights hidden within your data, but you’d have to know to look for them first.

This new feature uses AI to automatically execute thousands of queries across all of your sales commissions data to discover the insights you may have never even thought to ask for. Then it presents these insights to you in a convenient dashboard for you to peruse at your leisure.

It can pull out anomalies and outliers in your data that could indicate action you should be taking, but wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise.

Analytics Studio AI pierces through the noisy data to automatically identify and present you with cross-correlation reports, trend analysis, opportunity breakdowns, and more, all explained in natural language and illustrated with clear visuals.

Crucial comparisons with Change Analysis

When you look back over your data, it’s often easy to see that a change has occurred. For example, you may have a sudden spike in attainment. But it’s a lot more difficult to discern what factors caused the change.

Or at least, that was the case before we rolled out the Change Analysis feature.

Change Analysis allows you to easily identify the causal relationships between business drivers and outcomes. Just select two data points along a progression, right click, and select “Run change analysis.”

You’ll then be presented with a selection of reports to indicate what factors may have affected the change during that period. In this case, we can see that five key sellers were responsible for the spike.

From there, you can dig even further into the data to learn what these sellers were doing differently from others and how you might replicate their success.

You can use Change Analysis to perform similar comparisons on differences between time periods, teams, territories, products, and more, giving you never-before-possible insights into why your data shows what it does.

Learn how top sales teams are using AI

With Sage, Spot IQ, and Change Analysis, Performio is leveraging the power of AI to give you advanced sales insights.

But these days, AI is impacting just about every aspect of sales—from lead generation to sales coaching and more. And some uses of AI are better advised than others. As a sales leader, it’s your responsibility to take stock of the AI landscape, identify the best use cases, and steer clear of pitfalls.

To give you a head start, we’ve put together an ebook that helps you understand how to think about AI, provides guidance for using it in your sales team, and points you toward some of the best use cases currently available.

Download the free ebook: AI for Sales Teams: 7 Ways to Enhance Your Productivity with Artificial Intelligence.

And to see what Performio can do for your organization, request a demo today.