AJ and Meaghan recently had the opportunity to have a chat with Bernard Kelvin Clive of the BKC podcast.
It was a great opportunity to get a multi-cultural perspective on business growth and development. Check out the full interview below:
Data is the fuel for business success
In today’s marketplace, every business works in the data business. No matter what business or industry you fall into, data is vital to your success. While many people still think about data in terms of “big data”, every business can capitalize on the data they have.
While almost everyone understands that data has value, few businesses know what data they need to leverage to scale.
When we talk about data, the key point to remember is that data doesn’t involve crazy math or calculations. Data is just information. Eventually, once you have enough information, you can begin to recognize patterns in the data, and predict the future.
Every business has the power to access “big data” at this point. Most programs that businesses use to run their operations contain data on the back end. This includes things like: when your clients buy, how much they buy, what they buy, and so much more. Just having that small amount of information can help you understand your customer journey’s better. Once you understand their journey, you can better market your products and services.
No matter the stage of your business, you can be doing things with data
At Praxis, we often talk about the data maturity spectrum. No matter where your business falls on that spectrum, there are things that you can and should be doing to make sure that you can get the most out of your data.
If you’re at the beginning of your business, this could be pre-revenue or just starting out, the best thing that you can do is start collecting data. Lots of businesses in the start up realm still have CRMs, POS systems, websites, etc. Each of these systems can be a treasure trove of data if you set it up to track data. Most small businesses though don’t take the time to make sure that they have everything set up to track properly.
You can’t create data from scratch
The reason that it’s so important to set these things up early on in your business is because you can’t go back in time and create historical data. So if you find yourself ready to start analyzing data three years from now, and you haven’t set your systems up to track your customers properly, then you have to start completely from scratch.
You can’t make data-driven decisions without data, and you can’t get data without taking the time to set up your tracking.
More is better when it comes to tracking
Even if you don’t have the time to analyze your data, it’s very important that you start tracking it now. The more that you can track, the better. While you may not use all of it in the future, it’s much better to have too much data than too little data.
Whoever has the greatest understanding of their customers will win in the end.
Several of the biggest companies in the world are strictly data companies, and part of the reason that they got so big is because they collected data to better understand their customers.
Data helps you better understand your customers needs and wants; this allows you to better target and attract the right customers, as well as retain your current customers.
As a business owner, data analysis isn’t your responsibility
Your job as the business owner is to make sure that you have properly invested the time and resources into gathering the data. If you’ve done that, you can have specialists analyze the data for what they need. Your marketing team can scour the data for better customer insights, your project management team can find bottlenecks in your processes, etc.
In order to make sure that you track the right things, you need to know what metrics matter. Too many businesses track everything and then get caught in paralysis by analysis. They end up spending time worrying about metrics and numbers that will only make a small difference, if any.
The key to analyzing your data is making sure that you look at the metrics that will yield results for your business.
The best way to find these “needle moving” metrics is to figure out what business questions you need answers to. Generally, you can narrow down the metrics that you need to keep an eye on down to 5-10 metrics. We recommend “leading with revenue”, which means that you should focus on marketing and sales first.
Wrapping up the foundation level
To summarize the foundation level of data maturity, track everything, but don’t feel like you need to analyze everything that you collect. That is reserved for stage 2.
Stage 2: Analysis
Once your business has matured to the point where you want to start leveraging your data, you’ve reached stage 2.
You don’t necessarily need to analyze the data yourself. You can have your team analyze it, agencies that you work with, or you can do it yourself if you’re data inclined.
One way to start analyzing your data is to figure out the business questions that you want to answer.
The number one question we recommend that every business owner ask is “where do my best customers come from?”. Every business should have a clear answer to this question. You should know what marketing efforts create customers that come into your business and stay with your business.
Another way to analyze your data is to just start looking, and then see what questions arise as you look at the data.
Sometimes, by digging into the data, you can spot anomalies or outliers that spark your curiosity.
Many business owners think that they don’t have the time to analyze their data, and that’s why it’s important to set aside time to do it. Make data analysis a priority and chunk out time to at least poke around in the data. You can spend that time looking for answers to questions, or looking for anomalies. Either way, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of your business.
Most businesses are just one data-driven decision away from exponential growth
As we said in the last section, it’s very important to at least wade into your data once a week. Additionally though, it’s important that you schedule time to deep dive into your data, at least once a year.
AJ and Meaghan realized during one of these deep-dive sessions the key to exponentially growing their business. They realized that they wrote off hours like crazy in order to keep their clients happy. They over-delivered on their promises to make sure that they had raving fans.
This yielded them happy clients, but when they looked at their numbers, they realized that it had cost them $500,000 across the course of a year. This one thing was preventing them from scaling their business properly.
They decided to start scaling back the amount that they would write off with each client. They decreased how much they would write off each month by just 25%. This caused them to increase their revenues by 350% year-over-year, and their profit margin skyrocketed up by 1,000%! This allowed them to scale their team up to 10X the size that it was.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Until you analyze your data though, it’s hard to know what you need to change.
A positive data-driven decision
We had a client who came to Praxis looking to get better information on the lifetime value of their customers (LTV). They thought that they had an accurate idea of what it was, but wanted to double check to make sure that it was accurate. Together, we discovered that the lifetime value of their customers was much higher than they initially thought. Upon realizing this, they decided to increase their allowable cost per acquisition by just $5. This decision caused the funnel to go from about 12 sales per day to 350 sales per day in just 2 weeks.
From there, the funnel kept expanding, and within a month, they started to average 600 sales per day on this funnel… All from one data-driven decision.
A negative data-driven decision
We had another client who thought that they knew their LTV, but once we got into their data, we discovered that they had overestimated their LTV. Because of this, the company found out that they were actually losing about $3 per customer that they brought in. And they were doing a lot of sales…
Because they sought Praxis help though, they managed to stop the bleed and update their spend to reflect their reality.
The data will tell you what to cut and what to double-down on.
What is the next step, where should businesses go from here?
The answer to that question depends on where you fall on the data maturity spectrum. If you are stuck in phase one, you need to get your tracking set up. If you’re stuck in phase two, you need to determine if you need help understanding the data and taking action from it.
The best thing that everyone can do right now is run an audit of your systems and see where you stand in your business. Diagnose where you fall on the data maturity spectrum, and from there you can see what next steps you need to take.
Another huge thing that helps all companies regardless of size, is to aggregate your data in one place. Some people call this phase “spreadsheet hell”, because it generally requires a lot of spreadsheets. If you want to avoid spreadsheet hell, we recommend leveraging a business intelligence (BI) tool. BI tools are much more expensive than just using spreadsheets, but they also allow you to perform much more complex analysis and leverage the data in new ways.
Tools won’t solve your problems
It’s important to remember that even if you buy a BI tool, it’s not going to solve your data problems. You still need to have your tracking in place, and you still need someone to analyze the data. Additionally, you need to have plans in place to take action on the data. If you see a dip in your data, you should have a plan in place as to how you want to deal with it.
Every company needs to start thinking about their data as one of their most valuable resources.
Data just surpassed oil as the most valuable commodity on the planet. Information is king. If you know more than your competitor does, then you have an opportunity to outmaneuver and outperform them at every turn.
Caesar’s Palace recently went bankrupt. On their balance sheet, they listed out their data as the most valuable asset that they had.
Every interaction with your clients is an opportunity to learn something new. If you’re properly tracking everything, then you can gain insights and scale your business infinitely faster than by going off gut instinct.
The fastest way to scale your business is to figure out what is already working, and double down on it.
What can people do to better use data in the world of branding?
Start tracking creatively. Tracking doesn’t have to just be about how many people came to the website, or how many people clicked a button. You can track anything that you can imagine. We had a client come through who used Instagram as their primary lead source. They went through all of their posts and tracked what colors they used in the post, how they framed the image, the location, everything. They then overlaid this data with their like, share, and comment data to find optimal posts.
Because they had this data, they knew exactly what their customers wanted to see from them and when. This allowed them to double down on the things that worked for them and cut out the waste.
