Drive your business growth through data-driven decision making
Data allows an organisation to understand its business environments more effectively, determine the root cause of problems and conduct an accurate business forecast with which to make sound business decisions.
The most successful businesses either have in-house data departments or depend on companies, whose main objective it is to collect and synthesise data, for help with making informed decisions.
The greatest business people make data-driven decisions with confidence.
What is data-driven decision making?
It’s the process of using data to formulate strategies or make decisions, both in your personal capacity and in your business. By doing so you partially validate the outcome before the implementation process.
Data doesn’t only contain numbers and figures. Itt also consists of others’ opinions, within your business, coupled with customer feedback. These opinions, beliefs and feelings, when leveraged effectively, are paramount in helping any business succeed.
Why, then, neglect the one aspect — data — that can assist your business to reach better heights?
Relying on your gut alone can lead to inefficient processes with a negative end-result. Encourage your leaders and employees to make better decisions with data everyday. Start by choosing an appropriate analytics technology and teaching techniques for adopting data-driven decision.
Makie it a norm for your day-to-day operations while encouraging critical thinking and curiosity at all levels. A data-driven culture is all about enhancing, validating and affirming your gut feeling, to make decisions with facts and not purely assumptions.
Who drives change in your business? The people. How do they do that? They make decisions. Sound business intelligence operations leads to sound business decisions.
It has to involve a mix, though. A company that adopts only business intelligence and neglects its people is more of a computer, not a company. That’s not going to drive change or add value for anyone.
Hence, establishing a data-driven culture is important for business growth but it’s not a way to replace the human intelligence that you’ve hired along the way.
How to use of data to drive decisions in your business
Using data to make decisions doesn’t mean that you won’t need to apply caution or ringfence your testing. Don’t hesitate when making data-driven decisions, but understand that your interpretation of the data will be validated or invalidated through the process, and that you may need to make a follow-up decision again soon afterwards.
Prepare to make decisions with confidence and learn from both the validations and invalidations, in order to reduce stress levels and anxiety throughout your business. All the while, stay true to your beliefs and take accountability for your actions.
You want to be clear about your reasons for collecting data, taking into consideration that not all data collected is useful for your current business objectives. Use what you need and follow through, all the way from the data acquisition point to the space within your business operation that it shows value. What you really want is real-time insight so that you can accurately forecast what will or won’t work in the future.
Using business data to formulate strong marketing strategies
It takes time to develop this skill, which is one of the key reasons that we offer Fractional CMO Services. Your Fractional CMO periodically evaluates the right business data to help you make sound business decisions so that you don’t waste your precious marketing budget.
Put processes in place and hire skilled people who will be responsible to gather and manage your data. If you don’t already have these in place, you might want to invest in training programmes to better equip your team. Turn information into great ideas that can be easily implemented. These are SMART objectives.
The benefits to your business range from greater accountability, continuous improvement, more effective innovation and faster decision making.
Do you need support with linking your business performance data to smarter marketing activities? Contact us to take advantage of our expertise.
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