As 2025 approaches, SaaS usage in business has rapidly increased.
But, is your SaaS offering getting the recognition it deserves? To get a reliable answer, CMOs must unlock the power of data analytics and business intelligence (BI).
Your forward-thinking peers are leveraging powerful analytics with easy yet impactful data visualization options, aiming to save resources and hundreds of hours putting together reports.
Moreover, efficient BI solutions help CMOs transform scattered data into a compelling story that resonates with customers and stakeholders.
And while the value of BI is clear, selecting the right solution remains an arduous task. Many CMOs are overwhelmed as they endeavor to create a business case for BI tools in marketing. The purchasing committee must consider various factors to ensure their chosen solution enables them to:
Foster collaboration and comprehensive analysis
Enhance clarity and speed up decision-making
Drive growth and improve performance
Meet client needs more efficiently
This article discusses the transformative role of BI and data analytics tools, and outlines leading tools that give CMOs a holistic view of their SaaS past performance, current state, and future growth.
Necessary BI Capabilities
The process of “pulling data from multiple marketing sources and tools and spending precious hours analyzing them” is a thing of the past.
Thanks to the evolution of AI and automation features, BI solutions are now supercharged to completely transform marketing operations. These capabilities help CMOs track organic data, analyze paid ad performance, monitor social media marketing, and create impactful marketing reports.
To collect the right data and present it in an easy-to-understand manner—partner with a vendor that provides:
Data Visualization
Data Visualization formats (e.g., charts, graphs, images, etc.) are essential to improving data communication and analysis. With the exploding quantity of data produced every day, the quintillions of bytes of information are simply too much to make sense of without good data visualization.
Data visualization simplifies complex information and presents it visually to allow decision-makers to make informed, effective choices quickly and accurately. Moreover, it helps identify data trends much quicker and enables businesses to analyze complex data, discover patterns, and extract valuable insights.
There are many ways to visualize and understand data. These include dashboards, graphs, infographics, maps, charts, videos, and slides, all of which can be harnessed to pinpoint advertising challenges and inform future marketing efforts.
AI-Powered Data Analytics Platforms
CMOs are increasingly opting for data analytics platforms that deliver a simple interface for digital data collection. And rightly so. However, a new criterion has recently emerged to become top-of-mind for almost every decision-maker: AI.
While traditional tools forced peers to sift voluminous data to uncover meaningful insights, modern, automated tools empower professionals to unify data from across touchpoints and make it viable for analysis. In addition to significantly saving time, automation also increases accuracy, so businesses are always a step ahead in their strategic planning.
A comprehensive platform will also provide predictive analytics capabilities, positioning CMOs for success by forecasting future trends and outcomes based on historical data. This feature helps spot opportunities and avoid risks—and allows professionals to predict customer churn and improve sales forecasting.
Diagnostic Analytics
These tools enable you to drill down into historical data to find the reasons for particular events or outcomes.
Diagnostic analytics tools rely on past performance and pattern analysis to determine the root causes of an event. These tools use data mining, statistical analysis, and reporting to identify irregular patterns and conduct comprehensive customer behavior analysis.
With this data, CMOs can swiftly uncover why customers do what they do, like abandoning a shopping cart or switching to a competitor. By understanding these root causes, you can:
Understand what’s going wrong
Address the underlying issue
Tailoring offerings to meet the needs of consumers
With the right solution, CMOs can refine processes, mitigate risks—and foster continuous improvement.
Prescriptive Analytics
Predictive insights go a step further by providing specific recommendations for action. Advanced techniques, such as optimization, simulation, and decision trees are used on these tools to decide what to do with the data at hand.
CMOs can confidently answer the question, “What’s our next step?” by analyzing several scenarios and their possible outcomes. Implementing predictive analytics enables organizations to make data-driven decisions that not only react to predicted trends but also improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Using these insights, businesses can boost their overall performance, cut costs, and produce more personalized customer experiences.
Selecting the Right BI Tool for Marketing Excellence
Strengthening customer relationships is an ongoing mission for SaaS businesses. That’s why CMOs should embrace modern ways to extract valuable insights from the vast amounts of information available.
However, the overwhelming nature of today’s BI marketplace continues to thwart investment efforts. The following tools are renowned for being market leaders, enabling CMOs to overcome emerging challenges with robust analytics and powerful integrations.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social makes social media management simple and actionable for marketers. With efficient social listening and sentiment analysis, CMOs can leverage an in-depth view of brand reputation and audience sentiment to shape content strategies that resonate with their audience.
In addition, Sprout’s AI helps assess historical engagement trends and recommends the best posting times to maximize reach and engagement—freeing marketers’ time and resources to concentrate on tactical improvements.
With Sprout’s AI-powered analytics, businesses can strengthen their social media presence, make data-driven decisions, and more effectively achieve marketing goals.
Tableau
Tableau has gained the reputation of being extremely flexible. Teams with the right expertise and resources can analyze pretty much any dataset, creating a blank canvas for deep data exploration.
Thanks to this flexibility, this solution serves as a strong single source of truth that anyone in the marketing department can use to get data-driven answers. Tableau can also house and track all your B2B SaaS metrics so you no longer have to buy additional software, maximizing what you already have.
With the NEW Tableau rolling out, CMOs can now act on AI-powered insights in their flow of work, built on the Salesforce Platform with Agentforce.
Subscript
Subscript promises to put essential data right at your fingertips. The tool also lets you easily segment data by any attribute—even ones you haven’t thought of yet!
This gives CMOs instant access to important B2B SaaS metrics—like ARR, NRR, LTV, CAC, and more–that shed light on:
The payback period for customers who purchased a particular product
How a customer’s number of employees impact their likelihood of churn
Which customer segment is most responsive to upsells
And other valuable insights
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics also empowers you to know exactly how social media is helping drive your revenue, leads, and conversions in real-time; and get the insights to help you maximize your social ROI.
In addition, reports are customizable and easy to show stakeholders how your campaigns drive conversions, leads and sales, and what’s working.
Advanced Analytics helps you find top performers to double down on what resonates with your audience and drive sales and engagement. Moreover, you can track ad success on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X to optimize budget allocation. On top of that, you can track performance month-over-month and compare content to optimize your approach.
Conclusion
The challenge for CMOs in 2025 isn’t simply deploying BI; it’s choosing the right tools to cut through data noise and bring clarity and actionable insights.
In an ever-expanding SaaS landscape with ever-more complex customer journeys, BI allows CMOs to connect the dots and make sense of the disconnected data that is today’s reality. They turn that data into actionable insights that help shape impactful marketing, smarter spending, and more meaningful customer interactions.
Each tool has its own role in B2B SaaS optimization, from powerful data visualization to AI-driven analytics. If CMOs choose the right BI solutions, they can streamline operations, predict customer needs, and ultimately take a more data-driven approach to growth.
Embrace BI as the ultimate sidekick. Inform your efforts toward marketing excellence.
