Want to grow your business? Use Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is essentially timely, accurate, high-value, and actionable business insights, and the work processes and technologies used to obtain them.

Businesses have more data than ever before, but scads of statistics can be overwhelming without the right reporting tools. Through traditional data gathering methods, users need to compile and analyze data and write related reports. This can be incredibly time consuming, especially for small businesses that may not have the employees to do it. With a BI program, you can pull data and create the reports at the click of a button thus freeing up time and resources allowing employees to be more productive on their own tasks.

Revenue systems can crunch invoices and cash flows, but they don’t pay attention to the factors behind the numbers. That’s fine, but business leaders cannot afford to ignore this vital information. Companies that are able to zero in on actionable insights and connect causes to effects will always be a few steps ahead of competitors.

Thankfully, they don’t have to do it alone. Business intelligence tools empower entrepreneurs to understand data in quicker cycles via reports and dashboards, allowing them to see what’s happening in real time and adjust accordingly.

Whether you are a sales person or a marketer, you probably like to keep track of your customers – probably using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution to help you. A CRM solution collects the data about your customers and tries to make sense of it, presents it to you in various tables and charts. That may include the entire sales cycle, from winning new customers, to servicing and tracking existing customers, to providing post-sales services.

Marketing managers can monitor the ROI of ads on different social media sites, sales leaders can test pipeline changes, and CFOs can track how key financial metrics affect cash flow in real time. More complex tools empower companies to get into predictive analytics — crunching data to anticipate trends and behavior patterns — or to use machine learning to optimize operations further.

How many times have you established a set of seemingly reasonable goals for a project or other venture, only to end up with an outcome that is drastically different? With BI you can keep track of information, and have it accessible by parties that need it, when they need it. BI goes a long way in helping achieving what you aim for.

These tools are designed for different audiences, which means both the tools and departments exist in silos. For example, a marketing team would work with a completely different system than a CFO might use. These tools will eventually evolve to span different departments and industries, but entrepreneurs would be smart to experiment in the interim to learn how BI can benefit their businesses.

One of the main advantages of investing in BI and skilled personnel is the fact that it will boost your ability to analyze the current consumer buying trends. Once you understand what your consumers are buying, you can use this information to develop products that match the current consumption trends and consequently improve your profitability.

BI tools are becoming more common and more complex. Regardless of your specialty or industry, there are likely several BI tools that could benefit your business. These tools have gained prominence in the past few years thanks to customer relationship management software, modernized accounting systems, marketing automation programs, and the proliferation of application programming interfaces.

As of 2013, 54 percent of finance executives said they didn’t have all the information they needed to analyze their performance. Four years later, data collection tools have flipped this situation from one of too little data to one of too much data. In response, BI tools have matured to allow companies to slice and dice data in numerous ways with a few quick clicks.

If you want to improve your control over various important processes in your organization, BI will improve the visibility of these processes and make it possible to identify any areas that need improvement.

Business leaders can now manipulate data in unique ways, allowing them to make a change, give it a few weeks to percolate, and then determine whether that change made an impact. As these tools become more powerful, companies that use them correctly will enjoy tremendous advantages, such as understanding customer behavior, increasing profit margins, attracting new clients, and ensuring marketing expenditures are driving sales.

A BI system is an analytical tool that can give you the insight you need to make successful strategic plans for your organization. This is because such a system would be able to identify key trends and patterns in your organization’s data and consequently make it easier for you to make important connections between different areas of your business that may otherwise seem unrelated.

The explosion in business intelligence platforms means companies no longer need to play a guessing game in terms of their finances or how to capitalize on the mountain of available data.

Everyone talks about the importance of data, but far too many business leaders rely on their instincts when it’s time to make hard decisions. BI tools create a clearer understanding of historical data and incorporate real-time updates, providing a quick return on actionable insights. The more you understand which metrics truly matter, the more effective your strategies become. But there is such a thing as too much too soon. When grocery delivery service Peapod wanted to explore BI, it started by signing up for Domo and gaining access to a complex dashboard of analytics. Peapod was drowning in a sea of statistics until it hired a data scientist who was able to dig in and identify one actionable metric every day. It’s great to have access to complex and interconnected data, but most companies are better off starting small and expanding from that foundation.

?Most companies don’t fully understand the consequences of churn. Losing half of your recurring revenue every year is unacceptable, but you might not even know it’s happening if you don’t leverage your tools. While many entrepreneurs would say a monthly churn of 5 percent isn’t a huge problem, the magic of compounding means that trickle swells to a flood of 46 percent annually — far too much churn for any business. BI tools enable companies to look at metrics such as monthly recurring revenue, breaking your clientele into high-value, medium-value, and low-value customers. These tools also provide visibility into what makes some customers more valuable than others by connecting their behaviors to key performance indicators. You can then use this information to identify opportunities to cross-sell or upsell, transforming low- and medium-value customers into high-value ones. Business leaders can pair statistical software R with visualization tools like Power BI to chart the customer journey through easy-to-use dashboards. And they can even understand behaviors that predict churn, such as low engagement in recent months, so they can prevent churn before it happens.

Without real-time analysis, you risk pouring money into projects that don’t create value. BI tools can help you assess your capabilities and determine which efforts are worth continuing. New BI tools are coming onto the market every day. For any insight you might want, a tool is probably available (or will be soon). Earth Class Mail, an Oregon-based company trying to disrupt the mailing industry, used a tool called Bright, which produces actionable insights that help SaaS businesses grow faster, to discover that a marketing initiative was not as profitable as it appeared. Earth Class Mail was running ads on a large ISP and receiving a significant number of sign-ups; initial figures showed a strong ratio of customer acquisition cost to lifetime value. Earth Class Mail thought it was a great pipeline until Bright showed that most customers were signing up for a free month of service and then canceling. This tool helped the company stop wasting money and put its budget to better use.

It takes a lot of work to wrangle the immense amount of data available in the modern business world. Thanks to business intelligence tools, business owners don’t need to wander in the dark or drown in a sea of data. By pairing these simple strategies with the right BI tools, you can get more from your data while improving your immediate projects and long-term prospects.