How your small businesses can win with a data-led approach

Data isn’t just a ‘nice to have’.Taking a data-led approach to running your small business is the not-so-secret sauce giving small businesses an edge over their competitors. Elise Balsillie, Head of Thryv Australia  explains how you can do it too.

Data analytics tools and AI-powered insights are no longer reserved for enterprise-sized businesses with impressive budgets. The power to make informed decisions, spot opportunities, find efficiencies and multiply results is now easily accessible to small businesses.

The big question I hear from small business owners who are interested in a piece of the data-driven pie is “where do I start?”

If you’re looking to stay competitive and begin to make data-driven decisions for your small business, here’s the approach I recommend taking:

1. Ditch the notebooks and spreadsheets – time to automate

I can’t stress this enough – keeping business data like customer information and financial documents in filing cabinets, or manually entering details into a spreadsheet, is one of the biggest reasons that small businesses are falling behind in time and missed opportunities.

Since it’s well-known that around 90% of spreadsheets contain errors and 62% of Australia’s labour is spent on tasks that could be automated with existing technology, ditching manual processes for automation is a quick win for small businesses and frankly a no-brainer.

Investing in a digital customer relationship management system (CRM) to house your data, centralising your information and taking away the effort of manual data entry, is the first (and most important) step.

2. Habitually clean your data

The piece that successful data-led small businesses are getting right is the importance of regularly cleaning data.

There’s no denying that sifting through contact records in your CRM can be an onerous task, but the truth is, any information in your database that is incorrect is going to hurt your sales team and their campaigns far more than it will help.

The secret is to make data cleaning as much a part of your daily routine as your morning coffee is to check regularly for:

• Uncapitalised names and unformatted phone numbers.

• Duplicate contacts.

• Inactive contacts, outdated information and data you no longer use or need.

• Typos (commonly found in email addresses).
• Disconnected tools – make sure the information feeding in from sources is received and stored. Changing account passwords can cause errors.

Find the meaning in the numbers

This is the exciting part and where businesses are making leaps and bounds in their marketing and sales efforts.

Depending on the type of data you’re collected, there are a number of ways to leverage the information to help make business decisions, connect better with customers and streamline your processes:

• Get personal: Customers want to feel like your brand is talking to them, and you run the risk of off-putting them if you get key details wrong. Use your managed data to personalise marketing efforts, using information such as names, preferences, birthdays and sales data to help your business connect on a personal level.
• Spot opportunities: By analysing the numbers, your business can spot trends as they emerge. These trends could include products that are performing well, marketing campaigns that are exceeding expectations and opportune moments to double-down on your efforts. This is made easy in CRMs, through custom dashboards with data visualisations that make understanding trends simple.
• Pin-point issues: If a particular product isn’t selling, your email campaign isn’t performing or your leads are dropping off at a certain point in your customer journey, analysis allows small businesses to realise issues in real-time. This quickly minimises the impact of any problems that might otherwise go unnoticed.
• Optimise costs: Campaign not performing, sales team not jumping on leads when they land, or cash-flow looking unhealthy? Data-led small businesses are across their cashflow and looking to their analytics to optimise everything from marketing to operations, so they get the most milage out of their dollars.

Data is how small business frontrunners are getting ahead and staying ahead, and there’s no better time than the present to seize the opportunity that collecting, maintaining and analysing data in a reliable and affordable CRM can offer your business.

Want more? Get our newsletter delivered straight to your inbox! Follow Kochie’s Business Builders on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.