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The single most valuable commodity in business today? Data. The insights and operational markers that your data holds has the power to completely transform what you do and how you do it. But many small businesses still aren’t taking full advantage of this, and that’s mainly because of the sheer volume of what we can now know. When everything is available to you, how do you choose which data insights will best serve your purpose? The trick is to let your goals for the business dictate which data markers you pay attention to – and then to use the information you get to dynamically change your strategy as you go to ensure those goals are achieved. Data really does have the potential to change how you do business in so many ways. These are just a few of the key areas where the right data management can have a huge impact.

Create A Single Source Of Truth

The potential map of data that you have access to as a business is huge. There are gigantic volumes of external data which can inform you about changes in the macro-environment and consumer behaviour using real-time tools like Live Earth. And there are also lots of data streams to be found within your own business – marketing, logistics, sales and usage data to name a few. A process needs to be undertaken to establish the integrity of each data stream, and move towards pulling it together into a platform that will work as the ‘single source of truth’ for the state of your company, using the best CRM system you can find. Your business decisions are only as good as your data, so putting the work in upfront to get them right is crucial.

Control Organizational Bias

Bias is an inescapable fact of human nature – our brains naturally want to make assumptions and shortcuts, even though we know them to be dangerous. To avoid falling into this trap, reliable data allows you to move away from unconscious bias in business decisions and be purely let by objective facts. We operate under many layers of this, from recency bias to reconfirmation bias, so taking it back to known facts helps you remove the blinkers you may not even have known were there.

Get An Accurate Business Health Check

If you have an incident like a sudden drop in sales for one product, of course you want answers as to why. But when you look at only one subset of data, or accept an anecdotal explanation, you may not be getting a true picture of what’s really going wrong. With access to a data platform which lets you see the whole of your data streams in one place, it becomes much easier to accurately identify causation and look for patterns across the board.

Change Your Strategy

The most successful businesses these days are one that can innovate rapidly, respond quickly to changing market conditions and adapt their strategy – and good data is the way to achieve this. Your business plan should not be a static document. Instead, you need to work on responsive operations that are data driven. This actually neutralizes a lot of the risk, because you have careful analysis and real-time customer behaviour as the drivers of any change.