Photo from Mikael Blomkvist (Pexels)

As reported by Bloomberg, 97% of decisions taken by businesses are devoid of data. What this means is that rather than making important business decisions based on facts and performance, they are made based on assumptions. A prominent reason for this drawback is the lack of easy and quick access to data among employees across organizations. The lack of data-driven decisions can lead to financial losses, ineffective use of resources, and the downfall of a company. 

To help you overcome these challenges, it’s important for businesses to analyze data so they run more efficiently. Business process management (BPM) can automate and optimize processes and workflows by analyzing how people, systems, and data interact. By streamlining and improving previously laborious business operations, BPM technologies and solutions allow you to operate more efficiently. When creating a BPM framework, make sure you’re constantly monitoring its effectiveness and then acting on monitoring info to take steps to improve the process and output.

Here, Blackhawk Coach explores other ways to collect, analyze and utilize data in three core areas of your business.

Customer Acquisition and Retention

A CRM will improve your decision-making process and seamlessly allow you to interact with customers at the best time and through the best medium. With a CRM, customer data collected by various teams such as sales and marketing will be stored in a centralized dashboard which can be shared with all employees.

This data can then be analyzed for the following:

• Predictive Analysis: Predicting future customer behavior based on their past actions. For example, if a customer bought five gifts from your website last year for Christmas, you can predict they’ll do the same this year.

• Descriptive Analysis: This includes drawing inferences from the data as a whole, to find major trends. For instance, you may find sales numbers peaking each year between August and October. On deeper reading, you may find the cause and then apply the strategy to achieve those numbers year-round.

• Personalization: According to research by McKinsey & Company the majority of customers prefer businesses that provide them with personalized experiences. Your CRM data will allow you to understand trends regarding individual customers and provide them with the experiences they demand.

Website Performance

In today’s digitally driven world, having an amazing website is key for a successful business. A website serves as a multifunctional platform where you can promote and sell products and generate a ton of customer data. This data can give you insights regarding customer behavior, website performance, and areas of improvement. Here are a few ways to analyze and use website data:

• Track Website Traffic: Traffic is the number of users who visit your website in a given period. Additionally, you can segregate traffic into new and returning users. If you are currently running marketing campaigns, an increase in traffic can be viewed as a good sign. But there are other variables such as bounce rate, average time on page, session time which will need to be taken into consideration.

• Lead Collection: Having a contact form on your homepage is a classic method of collecting high-intent leads. Your sales team can use the form data to contact potential leads and convert them into customers. If you are experiencing lower than expected form fills, it signals an improvement is needed on the webpage. This can include better text, new form placement, lesser form fields, etc.

Financial Management

Having structured financial data will make it easy to identify the best and worst-performing areas of the business and make required changes. Additionally, this data will help keep your business financially healthy by staying on top of payments to be made to lenders, and suppliers while keeping track of receivables.

While using excel sheets is common among small businesses, they are tedious to maintain and prone to human error. Rather, you should consider using an API (application programming interface) integrated with your payment software that tracks transactions, allowing you to gather financial details. This data can then be used to analyze the following:

• Liquidity Ratio: This measures the amount of liquidity you have to cover business debts and meet working capital needs. A low ratio (less than 1) indicates the need to reduce liabilities. While a high ratio (over 2) points to underutilization of capital and the need for investment in assets, or research and development.

• Net Profit Margin: This ascertains your company’s earnings after taxes. Comparing this figure with that of competitors will provide you with a strong idea of your performance, and areas of improvement.

Making data a central part of your decision-making process will result in better utilization of resources, faster decision-making, and improved business performance.

Blackhawk helps small business owners triple their leads and double their revenue within 12 months — guaranteed!

Article courtesy from Naomi at LifeBasedBusiness.net