The Business Doctor: How to drive growth with business intelligence
In difficult market conditions, leveraging your business information is more critical than ever. But data alone isn’t enough. What sets apart the most successful companies is the relevance of their business intelligence and how it’s used for growth.
Start with growth in mind
Data or information gathered without a purpose is a waste of resources. It can leave genuine insights hidden in all the noise. Start by asking yourself what business information you need to support your growth objectives.
Think carefully about your growth strategy and what data you’ll need to execute it effectively. Do you want to generate more cash, make investments, and take on more staff? These are all best done with the support of relevant, accurate and current information.
More than just numbers
Having financial information you can trust at your fingertips is a great start. But with the pandemic, rising prices and inflation putting a real squeeze on businesses, not to mention bringing uncertainty, you need to understand the health of your business more broadly. This means getting to grips with both financial and non-financial reporting.
Four areas for improved performance
Not sure what broader business reporting could look like for you? Here are the four areas where we see the greatest opportunity for driving growth in the businesses we work with with intelligence:
1. Client data
Ensure you’re tracking your interactions with potential and existing clients and your success rates. Use the data to map the likelihood of future revenue and when it will come in. Pipeline information and conversion rates are crucial; they help you understand whether your proposition needs work, and they help you look and plan ahead.
2. Your people
You’ll need an in-depth understanding of your people and how they will deliver your growth plans. Capture and analyse current capacities and outputs. Find out staff engagement levels and track them. Look at recruitment. Are you bringing in enough people, what are your recruitment rates, and how much time are you spending on recruitment?
3. Operations and delivery
Do you have workflows telling you whether you’re meeting all your project delivery requirements? This kind of information needs to be captured and analysed to understand how well things are running and where resource needs to be focused.
4. Finance
You’ll need timely and accurate revenue, cashflow, and profitability views. But it also needs to be forward-looking with forecasting elements. These should be complemented with insights that tie them back to your business goals. It should help you understand whether you’re on track and, if not, what needs to change.
Make it useful and relevant
When collecting all the right data types for your business, you’re partway there. Next, you need to make sure it delivers value. Your business intelligence needs to be given the right way to the right people, allowing them to make decisions and do their jobs effectively.
When this is all done in alignment with your business objectives, you’re on the path to growth.
Get in touch
Contact us to learn more about how we can help grow your business.
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