Whether you're a brand new entrepreneur or an experienced one with several years of running a business (or multiple businesses!), there's a lot you can do with sound solutions in place for data analytics and business intelligence (BI). Sure, you can attain a great deal of success without them, but with the analytics on your side, you can cut to the chase much quicker - skipping the guesswork and getting straight to addressing exactly what makes your customers tick.
With fast access to these insights, you can adjust your product research and development marketing strategy accordingly to increase profits. Research shows that the companies that get the most value from BI are those that are focused on collaboration with their teams, while those who don't are focused solely on technology. By 2018, the big data market is expected to reach a total market size of $114 billion.
If you see patterns in the data, you can easily use the patterns that speak to what your customers are responding to most dramatically, so you can provide a number of upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
To identify your upsell and cross-sell opportunities, start by listening to your customers. If you're operating in the B2C sector, perform some research into what people are saying about your brand and products on social media and consider sending out a short survey via email. If you're from a B2B company, during your account reviews, discuss what initially brought your customers to you, why they continue to do business with you, and how your product/service is directly helping them. In either scenario, the goal is to determine what other products and services could you offer that would enhance their experiences.
To deliver these offers, you can either offer them online in a manner similar to Amazon's lists of products other customers have purchased together with the item at hand. It's also possible to bundle products together, making it easy for customers to add multiple related products to their cart with the single click of a button. If you're not in the ecommerce space, you can simply offer additional products/services when you speak with clients either in person or on the phone.
With BI, you can get immediate answers to the questions you have about your business. This allows you to make quicker decisions without having to spend time reading through countless pages of reports before you make a move.
A good BI dashboard will give you high-quality visualizations to help you digest large amounts of data quickly, letting you get to the trends that matter. With reduced latency in your data syncs, you can make decisions quickly - before you miss the trends at hand. Cloud warehousing, governance, and embedding allow the right people to get the data they need, when they need it, on the device of their choice, at the location of their choice - whether they are skilled IT professionals or not.
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