All organizations / businesses use data in some shape or form. Whether it’s cutting edge AI and other technology or carbon copy receipt books your organization / business has and uses data on a daily basis in some shape or form. The question is not should I use data in my operations or not, but how effectively am I using data for the key goals and activities of my business / organization.
Tip 1 – If you can’t or aren’t using it then it won’t help and you’re missing out.
Even the most basic of insights into your operations can make a real difference for you. Whether it’s identifying your most common selling items, your busiest days of the week, basic customer profiles or developing a target audience for marketing, there is some way that your business can benefit from using data. Finding the answers to many questions through the use of data can help you to grow your business. Some examples are: Who are my top customers, how often do they patronize my business, how much is their average purchase and what products or services are they most interested in? What is the profile of a typical customer for my business? Am I reaching the customers I want to? How much am I spending on operational costs per month?
Tip 2 – It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to do the job.
There are a lot of tools out there for data collection, management, and analysis. You may not be familiar with any of them or perhaps you’ve seen a report or visualization and thought that it would be great to have something similar for your business. There are many software systems that can handle massive amounts of data and produce great looking visuals and reports but these may not be the right fit for what you need. Excel or other spreadsheet applications are in fact very powerful tools, but most people don’t know how to get the most out of these systems so they sometimes start looking for alternatives, which can be more expensive and sometimes unnecessary. The odds are that if you’re a small to medium sized business, unless your business is specifically built around large amounts of data, that a basic spreadsheet application can pretty easily meet your needs. This is especially true if you hire a capable professional to help you set things up to get the most out of these tools.
Tip 3 – Data is a means not an end.
Collecting and utilizing data must be understood in the context of a particular goal or set of goals. The purpose of your business and what you’re trying to accomplish whether in the short-term or long-term must be the first consideration. This is because data helps us to understand questions and guide decisions, by itself it can’t tell us what our goal or target should be. Additionally, if we don’t have a clearly defined purpose and question we won’t be able to determine what data we need to collect and what methods we need to use to analyze it. So before you start to think about data and your business be sure to clearly define your objectives first and to know where you’re at in relationship to those objectives.
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