Five steps to building an effective SMB analytics initiative
Analytics tools are commonplace in today’s digital economy, but many organisations don’t fully utilise them. Small to medium businesses (SMBs) are particularly bad offenders due to a lack of in-house expertise, nascent or non-existent processes, or misunderstanding of the tools’ purposes.
If you’re an SMB exec, there’s good news: with just a few steps, SMBs can leverage business analytics much more effectively. These steps will open up a whole new world of insight into your organisation and help you take it to the next level.
It’s very easy to use these tools to analyse one part of your business, such as your marketing output or accounting package. However, pigeonholing your analytics tools means you’re not using them efficiently. Open your boundaries and be willing to use your analytics across the organisation, not just in silos. For example, analytics can co-relate your accounting package, CRM, and execution system, thus allowing you to achieve much deeper insights about your entire organisation’s operations.
As an SMB, your people are experts in your chosen business, but IT is not necessarily a core competency of that business. When an SMB hires someone to manage their IT, there may not be a clear career path within the firm for that person. For this reason, it’s very difficult to hire and sustain a position that’s nonadjacent to your core business.
If you want to use analytics more effectively—and you should—you must hire the specific skill sets needed and lay out a clear career path for those hires. Don’t assume employees who might be good with a spreadsheet or numbers are going to be your data scientists—sure, they could wind up having a talent for analysing your data, but don’t rely on that. Hire for the role(s), bring in the talent that you need, and make sure that you have the career path to keep them.
Presently, many SMBs are using their analytics in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. This will not serve your organisation and means you are losing key benefits from your analytics. We often see organisations spending money on highly sophisticated dashboards that nobody looks at.
