Write back data & comments to a database or file

In the preceding blogs, we looked at why sales meetings are inefficient and how you can capture sales projections directly in your Power BI report. We then looked at how you can use Power BI reports to facilitate data-driven comments and conversations.

In this blog, we will look at how data can be persisted to a Snowflake, Azure or a SQL database, or even a shared folder like OneDrive or Sharepoint. We’ll then look at how these reports can be scheduled. We’ll also touch upon one final feature, the audit trail, which assures report integrity.

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Continuing from the previous post, once the projections have been finalized, the manager clicks on the writeback prompt and chooses specific data that needs to be persisted.

He then chooses the destination which can be an on-premise or cloud SQL database, or a shared drive like OneDrive. In this case, he chooses a snowflake database and clicks Writeback.

When you query your Snowflake table, you will notice that the data has been stored along with the comments entered by the manager and sales reps.

For a step-by-step tutorial on how to writeback data from a Power BI report, watch out for our upcoming blog on Power BI data writeback is as easy as 1-2-3.

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User-Specific Email Scheduling of Reports

Finally, to streamline the process, the manager also schedules a weekly report that sends PDF and Excel extracts to his sales reps 15 minutes prior to the commencement of the meeting.

The manager can also configure it in such a way that each sales rep receives information only for the category they own. E.g., the sales rep for Computers sees only the subcategory line items relevant to Computers in his/her report.

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Audit trail of changes to the report

Finally, Inforiver allows the manager to keep track of all the changes made to the report using an interactive and filterable audit trail feature. This delivers a great level of data integrity and assurance to the report data.

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Closing Thoughts

Inforiver allows you to drive productive sales meetings using Power BI. You can

• allow managers or sales reps to update projections instantly within the report and quickly analyze variances
• add annotations & commentary to specific projections
• initiate data-specific conversations
• assign tasks and send email notifications right from within the Power BI report
• schedule periodic email delivery of reports in Excel & PDF
• track changes made to the report using audit trail
• … and more.

The best part is that everything can be accomplished and managed right from within Microsoft Power BI, without having to resort to offline emails, chats and conversations – making your sales teams highly productive.

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This post concludes the 4-part series on Driving Productive Sales Meetings with Power BI. Visit other blogs in the series below.

Part 1: Drive Productive Sales Meetings with Power BI - Introduction

Part 2: Input, Edit & Update Data (sales projections) in your Power BI report

Part 3: Facilitate data-driven comments & conversations

Part 4: Write back and save your projections to an on-premises or cloud SQL database or a shared drive (e.g., OneDrive) and other considerations (e.g., email report scheduling, audit trail)

Learn how Inforiver's writeback capability can transform your Power BI reports.