Business Intelligence; Your Secret Weapon

What if you had a secret weapon? A tool that could tell you if a decision was smart before it was made or pointed you in a positive direction? You wouldn’t leave home without it. It would not leave your side. That tool does exist for businesses, with the proper support and training. It is your company’s own data. Your company can hone in on what its data can reveal to not only help you understand your past but, more importantly, to shed some light on your future.

Needing to be more efficient and show results are a constant push for any company. Despite our best efforts to defy the system, however, common sense is not the most reliable source for making such important business decisions. Data, on the other hand, removes most of the guesswork and provides a concrete foundation for decision making. 

Your company will likely generate too many business ideas to count to increase the bottom line for every department. However, ideas won’t necessarily deliver the results your executives expect. Data-supported ideas have a much stronger potential to deliver the results preferred. 

What if it were possible for your marketing department to reduce email bounces by half or to double your opens and clicks? Your social media outreach could grow exponentially by finding the times that generate the most response, using headlines that are most intriguing to viewers. What if it was possible for your sales team to close more deals, more quickly, and find prospects that are most in line with your current clients? What if your customer service group could determine upcoming issues solely based on past customer interactions with similar concerns? 

You would achieve your expectations more quickly and, at the same time, do so with happier, more loyal customers. Using data takes the guesswork out of your next steps and helps you focus your choices on what was successful in the past, for an improved chance at continued success.

Once you have incorporated data retention into your process, the next step involved in improving the bottom line is empowering your teams to discover and analyze the data on their own. With self-service analytics, this is possible. Your technical and data analysis (IT) teams don’t need to completely own the data decision-making process. By providing your sales, marketing and customer service teams with the training and tools to use technology to come to their own conclusions about the company data, IT is brought in as a partner in the equation instead of a reliance. IT will now have a greater seat at the decision-making table. 

In the end, your company will make smarter decisions when supported by data and the data’s accompanying analytics. Technology is growing in importance for every department, and it should not stop with automating sales and marketing actions and relationships. Empowering all departments to invest the time and energy into using your company’s history and data to find the next opportunities will increase your overall revenue potential and narrow your focus to the best opportunities. Aim for success with historical support.