Data is changing the game, no matter what industry you’re talking about. Data gives entrepreneurs the ability to look at their business from 30,000 feet, viewing trends and problems in a way that has never before been possible. It’s a technique that recalls the height of Pointillism, that all but forgotten artistic movement by which artists produced amazing works, one tiny dot of ink at a time.
There are a million different software solutions out there, all saying “Visit our webpage here”. But not all companies are offering the same amount of insight: the key to INCISIVE data. Without being able to draw a realistic narrative from these bajillion data points, data is only data. It only becomes a story, a history, a guide book, when you can see the patterns and make future determinations based on them. Here are some of the incisive data skills that you should look for when employing any company to help you with your data.
1) How Is Your Spending Paying Off? If you don’t know the answer to this question, you really are just grasping at straws. But unfortunately, many people have long lived in the dark ages of data understanding. Expenditures like marketing have been impossible for some businesses to understand, in terms of how much they are paying off compared to how much they cost. Data driven models of today can help you pin revenue and exposure changes to specific dollar spending in marketing efforts. The best ones can also give you a sense of how much almost every dollar you spend, regardless of the arena, is worth.
2) Is Your Workforce Efficient? This is an especially nettlesome question for people with medium or large businesses. If your workforce exceeds one hundred, it’s impossible for a single person, or even a small department, to have an accurate sense of what work is getting done, at least specifically. It’s important to use new data models to answer difficult questions regarding time, absenteeism, and work efficiency/productivity. But these are the most important factors in a business that functions. Take advantage of new incisive data models around what goes on in your workforce, and it’ll pay off many times over.
3) Where is Your Business Growing Fastest? You may think you can answer this question in your head, but chances are that you can’t. Businesses grow in ways that are difficult to perceive. These days you need to understand who is interacting with your brand the most, even if these interactions have yet to be monetized. Great data and an understanding of what it means can tell you where you business is growing, and give you hints about where to invest your time and money for further growth.
Data is changing the way all businesses operate. It’s all about who gets on board first. If you want to change the way you do business, eliminating inefficiency and the old school problems that just fell through the cracks, you’ve got to get on board with the cloud based data solutions which are starting to come through the woodwork.
