What are your key Bananas, sorry, I mean Assets ?? Ok let’s get back to the DATA

What are your key Bananas, sorry, I mean Assets ?? Ok let’s get back to the DATA

So, one of the team dared me to put bananas in the title of the newsletter, so I did, but this week I really wanted to have a think about assets in your business as there are many, I also wanted to pick out what we considered to be the top 3, in our business.

Now, my top 3 assets might be a little different to yours but there are a few things that should most definitely be in the top 5 or top 10 when it comes to running and owning your own business.

About 9 months ago when we were all mid lockdown, I attended a HR event online to help fill the gaps in my day, the purpose was to cover off HR topics or so I thought, but unfortunately, I got duped again as it was one of those thinly veneered webinars, which I found out to late, was being held to pitch HR insurance against tribunals. ??

Anyway, that is another story, but the interesting thing from this experience was part of the sales pitch was to, or so it seemed, to say as many times as possible “Your employees are you biggest asset”

Which obviously I don’t disagree with, but there are many others, the other 2 of our top 3 are our CUSTOMERS and our DATA. ?

Ok you might rate your data slightly lower as an importance, and systems might come first, but Data now and in the future, in your business is going to play a bigger role in helping you understand what type of customer engages and needs your services.?

Yes, we analyse this stuff a lot, so much so we might be a little obsessive, but the machine gun approach or the idea of “Throw enough mud, and some will stick” is no longer adequate, when it comes to prospecting and marketing.

Sure, you can spend all day on LinkedIn or Twitter trying to pitch your wares, yes you could buy a list of 10,000 contacts and blast emails with follow ups of “how about now”, “and now”, “and what about now”.

Ok I jest surly you’re not still doing that right, right, please tell me you’re not ??

Ok sure a good mix of this type of prospecting can work but let’s just take a step back and see if we can use your existing data as an asset and leverage what you customers are already doing for you.

Let’s start with customers, I’ll assume that you have a relationship with them, you keep in touch and they would be happy to help, I’ll also assume you are there to help them when they need help in using your product or service, this is basic customer service which I’m sure you are excellent at.?

Depending on the size of your business and the number of customers you have, there is an opportunity to create some very interesting analytics that can be used to create analysis around the key factors of “What you Do”, “When you do it” and obviously “Where you do it” we refer to these as the 3 w’s in business What, When and Where.

If you can analyse your customers by type and size you can also build views by location, granted if you only have 10 or 20 customers this might not be for you, but if you are running an eCommerce operation then you might have 1000’s of customers, and with that data you can build trends like this one.

Here we built a simple MAP of all the orders taken online, so what you might think, well here is the interesting thing, first you can see density of customers the old saying springs to mind “Follow the money” but you can see quickly where your products are getting traction, where your current customers are and which products they ordered meaning you can easily set up your marketing to follow the money or increase traction from those same areas i.e. use what you have to target more ?? in return, as like us and probably every business we all want more and more repeat customers.

If you asked me today what was important in running a software company like Mapsimise.com I would say

1, our team, as they make what we do possible

2, our customers as they tell us what we are doing right and sometimes wrong

3, would be our data and our systems, because understanding what you are doing is key for growth.

But that all said your business might be different, you might not care about which region or which country you are most effective in, you might not want to trend the growth of leads and measure that growth against your marketing activity or see if over time those trends by location change.

Obviously I think it is extremely important, but I would because out team run a data platform to help businesses like yours

So let me know below is your data important to you, do you use it to analyse what you are doing and what you have done month to month year to year.

As humans we like pictures so if you would like your data turned into a picture you can understand, then do give me a shout or send me a DM

As always thanks for reading and let me know if you found this useful.

Alistair

CEO Mapsimise.com

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