Best Ways to Apply Your Data to Day-to-Day Business Decisions
The data you collect on a daily basis through systems like the SAP BI tool is extremely important when making business decisions. Instead of having a meeting and blindly coming up with an objective to achieve, you can use the data to make a more educated decision on what your targets should be. By having accurate data readily available you will not only feel more confident in your decisions, but it can also help you be more proactive and spot things that may not be working out for your business.
So what are the best ways to apply your data to day-to-day business decisions? Below we look into different ways.
To Help Make Decisions In Meeting
When you have a company meeting, try to use the data you have collected to influence the decisions you are making. For example, if you run a sales company, you may think a certain product is your best and that you should push it more in future campaigns. When looking at the data you tracked, this may not show that it’s the case and in actual fact, you have other products that are outperforming what you thought was doing well. Without the data, you are essentially blind and guessing what you think is doing best.
Create New Streams Of Revenue with the Data
When using a system like the SAP BI tool, you’ll be presented with live information on how your business is performing. The data you are collecting could be based on a number of things and this can be used to create new streams of revenue for your business. The more accurate your data is, the easier it will be to spot gaps in the market which you can exploit to bring in business for your company. By using the system, you can present this data anywhere, meaning you could pull it up in a meeting to further back up a point you are making.
Revamp and Improve Current Practices
When reviewing the data you’ll often be presented with information on how you are currently doing. Instead of using this data to create new revenue streams as mentioned above, you could also use it to revamp and improve current practices. It could be that you are running a marketing campaign that can be adapted to be more efficient, or that you can change an approach you are currently making to a trend in the market that you have just spotted.
Spot Trends In the Market
The more data you collect on a day to day basis, the more information you have at your disposal. By looking through the data, you’ll discover different insights that may help you spot trends in the market. These trends you may not have known about before will affect your future business decisions. Alternatively, these trends you may have been aware of and this data confirms that you are making the correct business decisions.
Help Make Your Decisions Quicker
Using the SAP BI tool you’ll have access to real-time analytics instantly, all with a few clicks of a button. This gives you insight into the different data points that you are interested in and quickly allows you to make your decisions quicker. This works in two ways – it can confirm your campaign is working as you would like it to, or it can give you quick information that something isn’t right and that you should change something. The more you use the system the more you will understand the data you are being presented and be able to tell if it is right or wrong from a quick glimpse.
Measure Success
Data is extremely important to measure success! When running a campaign, the data you collect could represent your sales made, the click-through rate of an email, the number of calls an employee is making, how your profit margin is doing and so on. Upon reviewing this data, are the numbers showing that what you are doing is working – if so brilliant news! If not, then changes may need to be made. In some cases, you could run a test campaign at a smaller scale, measure the results and then make a business decision to scale it up or cancel the campaign altogether. This would be a lot harder to do if you weren’t collecting the data to help make your business decisions.
Create Future Campaigns
When running a business, it’s important to continually innovate, plan for the future and learn from previous campaigns that you have done. When making business decisions, use the data you have collected on previous campaigns to influence the decisions you make in your future campaigns. This helps increase the likelihood of your success as you will be making an educated business decision using the information you previously had. For example, if you are looking to run social media campaigns, you can utilize the data that you have collected to create something that will hopefully generate the most traction. You can see the best target audience for you and when could be the best time for you to post in order to get maximum engagement. This works the same for sales and soon you should start to see a positive increase based on using the data from prior campaigns to put this together.
Using the data you receive and applying it to your business is crucial to your success. Without it, you are essentially guessing as data is factual and can help you in many areas of your business. Try not to rely on the data as other factors can influence the data you are receiving, instead, use it to make informed decisions and to back up your opinion.
What do you think are the best ways to apply the data to your business? Are there any points you would like to add to the above list? Have we missed something that you think is crucial?
