Last week 1 Cloud Consultants were with a customer that from the outset seemed a pretty straightforward requierment. They wanted to track how many enquiries they were receiving on a month / year basis. It seems a straightforward requierment, but it also demonstrates the need to clarify exactly what is required and different potential scenarios. As we work through the example, the key question is what is a customer enquiry? A Zoho Analytics report of Leads created by month would look like:

When discussing the requierment further with the customer, they raise a valid point. An enquiry could be a new enquiry which would be a Lead that then needs to be qualified. Or it could be an existing Account / Contact that is making a new enquiry about your products or service. This brings another dimension and another type of report into the equation. Our suggestion was that for an existing customer making a fresh enquiry you would create a Deal and using the field called "Type" categorise it as Repeat Business. That way we can generate a report in Zoho Analytics that looks like this:

We now have two reports that give two parts of the answer but each one doesn't give the total answer. This is where the power of Zoho Analytics is demonstrated. We are able to create a report that combines both the Leads data and Deals data into a single report that gives the customer the answer "How many enquiries did I receive per month". This report would look like:

When you actually review the three reports, you actually realise that you are obtaining three separate pieces of information:

1. How many Leads are being generated on a monthly basis by Lead Source
2. How enquiries are being made by existing customers on a monthly basis
3. How many enquiries (a combination of new Leads and existing customers) are being made on a monthly basis 

Each of these three reports are valuable in there own right. You wouldn't want to necessarily run each report individually as it would be time consuming. This is where in Zoho Analytics you can create a Dashboard that these three reports are placed on. An example Dashboard from Zoho Analytics would look like:

This is a simple example of how Zoho Analytics can be used to analyse your data to provide the information your business needs to make key decisions. It also demonstrates how you can combine data to create a single report, place multiple reports onto a single dashboard and if you wished embed the reports or dashboards on a website (it could be an intranet or we could have secured the data with a password.

Note these reports are drawn from anonymous data in our demo Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics account. This is why the numbers are not really reflective of a true business. We have provided this as an example that you can interact with.