How Data Helps Businesses Make Better Decisions

Just the term big data is enough to turn some medium sized businesses away. After all, aren’t business intelligence solutions used to collect and analyze large amounts of data reserved for large organizations? Not really, in fact, any business that has been around for a year or more likely has “a ton of big data” ready to help you make better decisions.

So it isn’t the lack of data that holds many medium sized businesses back. Often times, it is the lack of how big stat can help and how to go about leveraging all of that information.

Benefits of big data for the small business

Even small to medium sized businesses stand to gain the same advantages as larger organizations when using data the right way. They can harness information to:

• Find new customers
• Increase customer retention
• Improve customer service
• Better manage marketing efforts
• Track social media
• Predict sales trends

And just how does data help in these areas? By giving your business the right information and the right time. Using this information your team has the data necessary to make the best possible decisions.

What kind of data should I collect?

The data you collect depends upon how you are going to use it. Take a look at some of the ways mentioned above to see what you plan to do with your data, and then determine what tools you have in place, or plan to procure, to help analyze that data. This will guide you down the path of what you should be collecting, but if you need examples some of the more commonly collected information is:

• Website analytics
• Social media analytics
• Sales trends
• Customer data (current and prospective)
• Sales records
• Inventory
• Survey data

Managing data

Now you know what big data can do, and you know what kind of information you are going to collect, but how do you harness it all into something useful? For that you need the right software applications. Tools such as enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions allow organizations to input and store data and then analyze and report on it.

While these software tools make it possible to manage all of this information, it still requires clean data to be input. This is why you need to ensure that data is input accurately and it is not duplicated since medium sized organizations usually don’t have teams of data entry professionals to handle this task or clean up any mistakes.

When investigating the tools that can help your businesses better leverage data it is important to remember that you need to put the right solutions in place. Applications built for large organizations aren’t always going to produce the same results for a company your size and will likely bring a higher price tag along with them. Conversely, software that costs far less than the standard should also be given an extra look to see if it is going to have all the features, and support, a small business will require.

If you see how big data can help, but aren’t sure where to begin to turn to the experts who can help you put the right tools, training, and processes to work.