These days, the most successful businesses don’t make decisions without consulting relevant data. After all, why should managers put the company’s time, funds, and reputation at stake to make decisions that they can’t back up with verified information? You can’t afford to waste your company’s resources on ineffective strategies, so check out this guide on gaining actionable insights from data to improve your organization.
Understand Your Organization’s Goals
Data isn’t very useful on its own. How will employees have any notion of how to use data if they don’t know what the company expects from them? Before you can make the most out of data, your company must have high-quality goals. Setting a target to increase the sales numbers of a certain product by 15% by the end of the quarter is an example of a useful goal. This goal is effective because it’s quantifiable, achievable, and specific. With this goal in mind, sales managers and marketers can analyze sales data, identify common factors among people who use the product, and adjust their marketing strategy accordingly. If your company doesn’t currently have any concrete goals, then you should meet with your most important stakeholders to figure out your organization’s direction as soon as possible.
How to get from where you are to where you want to be.
Know Your Audience
By understanding your audience’s preferences, demographic information, spending habits, and moral values, your organization’s leaders can tailor effective strategies to appeal to them. On top of gathering data based on sales and research, you should also find other ways to collect information about your audience. Do your customers spend a lot of time on a specific social media platform that you could extract data from? Will they respond to email surveys or fill out in-store customer feedback surveys? Which links do they click on your email newsletter? Does your typical customer hate phone calls? You don’t want to engage with your audience in an ineffective or offensive way, so these are all important questions to ask when figuring out how to gather useful data from your customers.
Promote an Evidence-Driven Culture
In daily life, people are used to making decisions primarily based on whims and gut feelings. This way of thinking is fine when someone’s deciding what to do eat for lunch, but the stakes are too high in your company to make decisions without data. Thus, it’s important to place a high value on data in your company’s culture. When team members propose strategies during meetings, they should know to back up their arguments with some kind of evidence. You’ll find that, once evidence-based thinking becomes a cultural norm in your organization, employees at all levels will operate more efficiently and make better decisions.
Data Will Help Your Organization Succeed
Your organization’s leaders can’t base importance decisions on faith alone. For your organization to thrive, you need to know how to set goals, analyze your customers, and use relevant data to craft effective strategies. You’re always looking for new ways to help your company succeed, so take a look at our other helpful articles about gaining actionable insights to bring your company to the next level.
