How to choose a Business Intelligence company for marketing and sales

Choosing a Business Intelligence company for marketing and sales is different from choosing any BI vendor. Most BI companies in Brazil, including large consultancies, were born to answer questions about operations, finance, or logistics, not to follow a lead from the click to the sale. The criterion that decides this choice is not the price or how the dashboard looks in the demo: it is whether the company understands the marketing and sales funnel or only data.

Generic BI speaks data, not funnel

Tools like Looker Studio and Power BI connect sources and draw charts very competently. The problem shows up afterwards: by default, they do not know what an MQL is, what an SQL is, or how a lead who came in through Instagram becomes a closed sale thirty days later on another channel. Each of these answers has to be modeled manually, and the team that hired the generic BI company is usually the one that sustains that model after the contract ends.

That was exactly the realization that gave rise to Laiki: years building dashboards in Looker Studio and Power BI until understanding that these tools were not designed for marketing and sales. The chart came out pretty. The question about which channel really brought in customers still had no reliable answer.

Five questions to ask before hiring

1. Does the tool already know what a funnel is, or is that up to you? If every marketing and sales metric, such as CAC, conversion rate by stage, and time to sale, needs to be modeled from scratch, the real cost of the BI company does not end at the monthly fee.
2. How many native integrations does it have ready with what you already use? Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and your CRM need to connect without depending on a manual spreadsheet export every week. Ask how many of these integrations already exist ready-made, and how many would be developed on demand.
3. Who organizes the source data before the dashboard exists? A pretty dashboard on data scattered across tools is still scattered data, now in color. This is exactly what needs to be solved before automating any dashboard: recognizing the same lead across different channels and standardizing fields. Ask whether this is part of the service or is left to your team.
4. What happens after the dashboard is ready? BI companies that deliver a closed project leave maintenance, adjustments, and new questions to whoever hired them. Companies that follow the operation after delivery solve new problems without opening a new project.
5. Does the contract have an exit? A long commitment and a cancellation penalty indicate that the vendor is more confident in the contract than in the result. A guarantee and no commitment are signs that the company stands behind the value delivered, not the commercial bond.

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What changes when the BI company was born for marketing and sales

A platform designed for this funnel already arrives knowing how to separate paid media, leads, deals, and customers in a single base, with automatic organization. In Laiki, this work is done by the ID Combiner: when the same lead shows up with a phone number, an email, and the WhatsApp BSUID, the system recognizes that it is one person, instead of adding half a point of interest to each separate record. This directly changes the count: a funnel that merges two or three records of the same lead as if they were different people inflates the number of leads and distorts the CAC calculated on top of it.

Dynamic dashboards, updated in real time and comparable by period, answer after that without anyone needing to update a spreadsheet. And when the question changes, such as who is ready to receive a call today, Lead Scoring calculates the priority automatically, instead of someone deciding by gut feeling who to call first.

How to compare proposals in practice

Ask each BI company to show, with your own set of sources, three things: how many integrations come ready-made, how long it takes to reach the first working dashboard, and who on the vendor's team follows the operation after implementation. A proposal that answers all three precisely, without relying on "we will develop that later", tends to cost less internal team time in the medium term, even when the monthly fee looks higher at the start.

Frequently asked questions about Business Intelligence companies

Does generic BI work for marketing and sales?

It works for building a chart on data that is already organized. The problem shows up before that: generic BI does not know, by default, what MQL, SQL, or channel attribution is, and someone needs to model that manually before the chart means anything.

Do I need a technical team to maintain BI after implementation?

It depends on the vendor. Generic BI companies usually leave maintenance with the internal team after delivery. Platforms specific to marketing and sales, such as Laiki, include ongoing support as part of the service, not as a separate project.

Is it better to hire a consultancy or subscribe to a platform?

A consultancy delivers a project with a defined deadline. A subscribed platform follows the operation for as long as it exists, incorporating new integrations, new questions, and new data sources without reopening a contract.

The question that decides the choice

In the end, the right BI company for marketing and sales is not the one with the prettiest dashboard in the demo. It is the one that already arrives speaking the language of your funnel, with ready integrations for the sources you use and someone who keeps responding after the contract is signed. Discover the Laiki platform and see how this works on the data your operation already collects.