3 ways to beat Data FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
Are you are business owner/leader?
Do you have more data than you could handle?
Do you feel overwhelmed with too much data?
You may have financial data + customer transaction data + SaaS usage data + marketing analytics data + more
Do you ever get the feeling that is so many insights to be gained, from analysing your business data, but you just don’t know where to begin?
You may be feeling Data FOMO (Fear of missing out - on business insights that could put you ahead of your competition).
Here are 3 practical steps you could take as a business owner to quickly gain business insights without hiring a data science team:
1. Data Visualisation
“A picture paints a thousand words”.
Data visualisation can be as simple as creating some bar charts or line graphs on Excel (or it can be more sophisticated using best in class software such as Tableau or PowerBI).
Data visualisation can be a quick way of summarising data to derive insights, patterns or trends that may not be obvious from looking at spreadsheets of data.
Sometimes insights are found accidentally. Try aggregating numbers in different ways and you might be surprised and delighted with insights that could inform better business decisions. For example, try subtotalling your sales transactions by customer segment, by geography (Post Code/City/State), over time (by day/week/by the hour). You may discover there are peaks or troughs (down-time) that you were not aware of and this could inform how you should behave in future to either save costs or generate more sales.
2. Your Business Vision and OKR’s (objectives and key results) required to get you there.
Revisit your business vision (ask yourself what are your key objectives for this year and what KPI’s/metrics are important for your business?)
Go beyond just revenue and expenses. Go one level deeper at the operational level.
How many prospects do you need in your sales pipeline, how many visitors do you need to your website, how many trials/demos you do need to perform, how many samples do you need to hand out?
Once you have these numbers in mind, then look for insights in your data sets to confirm if you are on track to reach your OKR’s this month, this quarter, this year, or NOT. If you are not on track, what should you change? Do you change tactics or do you pivot to another vision?
Let the data confirm what you already know or even inform what you “don’t” know.
3. Benchmarking
The third thing you can do with business data is to start benchmarking your financial or operational results against external data sets or benchmarks.
Once you have a handle of your key metrics (be at financial ones such as Revenue | Gross Margin | LTV | CAC or operational metrics such as # Website Visitors | #Demo’s | # Pitches), it could be valuable to benchmark your business against your external data.
Australian External Data can be in form of free data from government organisations such as NSW Fair Trading, ATO, ASIC and ABS. You could cam also try Googling it.
Paid industry data could also be useful but there’s plenty of free data from the government entities mentioned above.
Some great examples of free data include ATO’s Industry benchmarks (typical profit margins for different industries in Australia), Rent and Property prices data from NSW Fair Trading and ASIC insolvency data (highlighting industries with the most insolvencies).
Don’t feel intimidated or overwhelmed with data.
There’s no need to feel Data FOMO.
Take small steps and experiment with it, using the 3 themes mentioned above and your business will benefit from the data insights.
