Last week, I shared why business intelligence dashboards are now a must have for executives seeking to better understand, leverage, and ultimately profit from the treasure troves of data surrounding their businesses.
This data includes insight from their companies’ web and social media traffic, from its e-mail send and open rates, from its lead tracking systems and sales logs, from its product fulfillment records, and from its accounting software as it records revenues, expenses, and cash flows.
Pretty basic stuff, eh?
Well, maybe when viewed one source at a time, and/or over a limited time period with just a few data points, but given that a business doing as little as $1 million in revenues now has on average more than 20 data sources – from software services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, Quickbooks, ZenDesk, to dozens of Excel files and spreadsheets of every type and purpose, figuring what to do with it all quickly gets overwhelming.
And in business, when something gets overwhelming, what happens?
Nothing.
Yes, all of these treasure troves of data, insight, and intelligence just gets ignored.
Reports aren’t run. Or when they are run, they aren't read.
And when they are read, they are not really mined for insight, for “aha” moments and breakthroughs, for competitive advantage.
This sad state of affairs is the unfortunate reality for most executives in this information-overloaded business world of ours.
But not for everybody.
There are a select few that as opposed to being overwhelmed, are energized by all of this precious and unprecedented data.
That use it to both inform and confirm their "gut."
And when the data and their guts disagree? Well, more often than not they let the data hold the trump card.
These executives worship at the altars of both big and little things.
Big things like strategy, mission, vision, values, and culture.
But little things too like form conversion stats, proposal close ratios, page bounce rates, call hold times, quick ratios, and net margin growth to name a few.
How do they do it?
Well, first per the above, they have a functional relationship with data. They don’t whine about it nor are they consumed with how much of it there is.
And secondly, they don’t try to sift through and make sense of it by themselves.
They let technology do a lot of work for them. Both predictive analytics technologies like Civis, Kxen, Foresee, Angoss, and Verisium.
And strategic and business intelligence dashboard technologies like Domo, Pentaho, Birst, GoodData, and my firm Guiding Metrics.
Technologies that find the signals in the noise, and that help them win both the big and little games of modern business.
So now, how about you?
To Your Success,
--
Jay Turo
CEO
Growthink
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