Data Driven Decision MakingData helps provide a solid foundation for your business strategy, helping you to achieve your goals. The most effective business decisions are informed ones, stemming from data —
- Data reported from your business operations in real time
- Data that helps you identify important trends
- Data intended to provide you with insights to understand what works well and what may not be working
- Data that helps you correlate multiple activities and their collective impact on the business performance
Process
Every business is different and the metrics that matter most to your business will be unique. Let’s look at a sample of common data points that may be useful to the business goals you are striving to achieve. It’s important to point out that you may not want to start collecting every data point possible. Your specific goal or goals should be identified first and then work to collect specific data and information pertinent to those goals from both internal and external sources.
- Revenue
- Margin
- Profit
- Cash flow
- Asset value
- Retention
- Repeat sales
- Transaction size
- Customer satisfaction
- Engagement and reviews
- Customer lifetime value
- Market share
- Market trends
- Marketing spend
- Marketing performance metrics
- Marketing ROI
- Resource allocation
- Employee engagement
- Turnover
- Tenure
- Efficiency
- Capacity
- Inventory levels
- Backlog
- Inbound / outbound sales
- Outstanding proposals
By building simple dashboards that contain the relevant performance information, you can consistently measure actual performance against your goals. Use the data to ensure your decisions are based on evidence and patterns you’ve identified. All to help guide you to success as you’ve defined it.
The trends you identify can guide you to the issues that can change performance and drive your desired outcomes.
We worked with a client who had experienced top line growth but actually was unable to pinpoint why or how. When revenues began to fall, they sought to reverse the decline. We probed into the sales processes and learned that there was little structure in place.
As a result, our client lacked meaningful feedback to understand which service offers were in demand nor why select projects were not awarded. Outstanding proposals were not centrally reported, tracked nor followed up.
Our approach was to measure the sales process and its results. We created a simple system to collect all pertinent data — things like total sales funnel and status of all proposals — including days outstanding, revenue value and by service offer.
Actual results were reported on a simple weekly dashboard against new metrics derived from ideal levels for total pipeline value, open proposals, days outstanding and win:loss goals. We tracked the number of follow ups required by each sales team and the profitability of select service offers.
Performance was reported regularly and transparently, enabling the sales team to monitor results and take necessary actions to achieve results that would yield improved results. Together, we identified effective activity patterns. Select services were shuttered and emphasis was placed on proposals with the highest probability of success.
A great deal of success comes from smart and informed decision making. The best informed decisions can come from the right data, allowing you to identify trends and patterns and to derive insights and predictions. Take the leap to collect and review the data relevant to your business processes that will help you soar.
Lovely People helps clients determine relevant metrics and KPIs to help your business grow. Let’s talk.