Outsight Network gained a huge competitive advantage using Zoho Analytics

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    300+Trusted Users
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    10%Revenue growth YoY
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    4Different Datasources

"Our business runs on Zoho. Zoho is where we look first when we have a business need".

- Kay Edwards, Founder & CEO, Outsight Network

About Outsight Network

Outsight Network, is a network of consultants across the country who are mission-driven leaders. They have significant experience working with nonprofit and for-profit organizations. They're a network of senior-level consultants who apply their subject matter expertise to help organizations achieve their mission.

Challenges

Kay Edwards is the founder and CEO of Outsight Network, with expertise in market research and strategic planning. The company has 5 employees and 100 independent senior consultants and works with 6 partner firms.

Outsight Network does a lot of market research and handles different data sets for making insightful and strategic decisions. They also receive large data sets from clients, requesting that they manage and analyze them.

On top of this, their consultants provide long-term strategic counsel as part of their work with CEOs and Boards of Directors. They need to capture information in these counsels, identify issues, and find the root causes of the issues.

Outsight Network also does periodic benchmarking studies for a professional association of Christian camps and conference centers throughout the United States. This association has about 850 members, ranging from $200,000 to $20 million in annual revenue each.

They were looking for one BI solution that caters to all of these needs.

Outsight Network wanted a solution that could:

  • Import data received from leadership meetings and do root cause analysis
  • Analyze and create insightful benchmarking reports and publish them online
  • Enable secured sharing of reports globally with user-based permissions

"We provide ongoing strategy work for CEOs and Boards. The big challenge here is managing all of the information that gets generated from these high level meetings, understanding how these can be put together and getting to the root cause of the issues that our clients are facing. We have these meetings once a month. Managing all this data and seeing the big picture was always a challenge."

Kay Edwards
Founder & CEO, Outsight Network

Solution

Outsight Network's business runs on Zoho. They use Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator, and Zoho Projects. Being an ardent Zoho customer, they never looked for any other tools. They zeroed in on Zoho Analytics and started using connectors to integrate data from Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator, Zoho Projects, and QuickBooks using Zoho Analytics to perform end to end analysis.

"Meeting notes are entered and coded in Zoho Creator and synced with Zoho Analytics for visualization. This coding system is proprietary, something that I have developed over the years I have worked with clients. The data visualization in Zoho Analytics has really helped to bring this to life for me. It helps me to see the patterns of what is happening in the organization, so that I can provide counsel at a high strategic level."

Following discussions with Board of Directors and CEOs of client organizations, Kay uses Zoho Creator to enter meeting notes, which are then coded and synced into Zoho Analytics to create a "Big Picture Map"(TM)—a trademark of the organization. This map gives a bird's-eye view of client's issues and helps to do root cause analysis.

Data visualization enabled by Zoho Analytics helped Kay develop a proprietary product—Big Picture Map—which the company is planning to offer as a standalone product in the future.

Another project is the benchmark study for the association of Christian camps and conference centers. Using Zoho Analytics, Outsight Network built an online tool, where all members of the association can log in to slice and dice their data using filters. A director of the camp can log in to this website and find information, like salary ranges for camps of their size in their region.

"With Zoho Analytics, our ability to create a reporting tool has been a game changer. I don’t think any other association has a powerful data tool available for its members like we do. What this means is that the client is going to keep coming back to us every 2-3 years when they want to update their benchmark survey. This is a huge competitive advantage for us."

Zoho Analytics collaboration features allowed Outsight Network to share their benchmark results to over 300 members of the association. They also have several workspaces to create internal weekly reports, like employee productivity metrics, salary metrics, time sheet metrics, and more.

In a nutshell, Outsight Network's growth is propelled by Zoho Analytics. The benchmarking reports powered by Zoho Analytics are providing them with a huge competitive advantage. They're now developing a proprietary product for strategic analysis using Zoho Analytics, which they're planning to market in the future.

"Above all, our revenue growth has been consistently increasing at 10% every year, which wouldn't have been possible without Zoho."

Benefits & results

  • 10% consistent increase in revenue year over year
  • Outsight Network developed their proprietary product Big Picture Map (TM) for strategic analysis
  • Created an online benchmarking portal using Zoho Analytics
  • Sharing of dashboards to 300 plus users