Do you have more data than you know what to do with?
Most businesses do. In today’s world, everything is tracked, and it produces an overwhelming amount of information. Today, most professionals have a harder time sifting through irrelevant data than they do collecting data.
That’s a problem that we wanted to address in this podcast. We wanted to tackle the question: “Now that I have the data that I want, what do I do with it?”.
It’s not about how much data you have, it’s about asking the right questions and then letting the data tell it’s story.
Time is the most valuable asset that we have, yet we don’t keep very good track of it. Most people go through their days not really thinking about how they spend their time, and not realizing all of the time that they waste in a day. You should spend as much time monitoring your time budget as you do your fiscal budget.
If you want to maximize your effectiveness and happiness, you need to find ways to maximize your time. We all want to increase our productivity and optimize the effectiveness of our time, but eventually we all reach our “optimal level”. At that point, if we want to keep progressing, the only thing left to do is to eliminate waste.
Whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves, wasting time is a huge part of our lives. By decreasing the time that we spend on non-income producing tasks, we can further optimize our time, increasing our time spent on actually valuable tasks. By refusing to track your time as carefully as you track your money, you often lie to yourself. You convince yourself that you spent your time wisely, when in reality, you could have done so much more.
Track your time for 24 hours a day across 2 weeks, and see the story it tells.
Break down your day into 15 minute increments and see exactly how you spent your time across those 2 weeks. Often times it paints a picture that you don’t want to see; but that’s the picture you need to see. By seeing exactly how much time you spend doing things that aren’t worth it, you can see how much more you are capable of.
One client found that they spent only 2.5 hours per day producing actual income for themselves. They spent the rest of the day doing tasks that they considered productive, but on further examination, they found that they had much more pressing things to deal with.
We can automate, delegate, or eliminate so many of the tasks that fill our days; making us more productive, or allowing us the freedom to follow a new passion.
We have data in our CRM’s, data coming from social media, data from our website; how do we sift through it and find the things that actually make a difference?
We found that most small to medium businesses have 15-18 different sources of data. We also found that those sources of data rarely talk to one another. This turns into a huge drain on your effectiveness and time, having to go between all the sources of data to find the information that you need.
The first thing that you need to do in order to get out of the rut of going through all of those disparate pieces of data is a process called metrics mapping. Metrics mapping requires you to start with a high level view of your business and ask the questions that you want answers to. Most people want to know things like, “How much money am I making?” “Which products are driving the most revenue?” “Where am I losing money?”. After asking the questions, it’s time to figure out what metrics, or KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) answer that question.
After you know what metrics you want to measure, it’s time to find what system tracks that data, and which one you trust the most. If you want to know how much money your business has, your Paypal, Stripe, or bank account is probably a good place to use as where you pull that metric from. If you want to know how many visitors came to your site yesterday, you would probably turn to Google Analytics. Once you have picked out that “source of truth” for each metric, you can begin to track that information and start answering your business questions.
Almost every company has holes in their data, generally because people don’t recognize the value of that data.
Many organizations have problems with incomplete or inaccurate data. There are several potential solutions to this, but the best ones generally are to either automate out the data collection or to train everyone in the organization in the value of the data. Automation represents a long-term and scalable solution to the problem, but it also generally requires a large up-front investment in the technology. For that reason, many businesses would rather just train everyone in their organization on the importance of the data, and how it can actually make a difference for both the individual and the organization over time.
The sales team is the most important team to communicate this to. As one of the first groups that has contact with the clients, they have access to massive amounts of data that often falls by the wayside because they don’t view it as important. Allowing them access to the data and the insights that come from that data is one of the easiest ways to show them the true value of the data that is being collected. If they can see the direct correlation between their data collection efforts and the insights that allow them to make more money, they will never again willingly let data slip through the cracks.
Reward the habits and not the results.
In sales we have lead indicators and lag indicators. The lead indicators are the things that you have complete control over, i.e. contacting x number of leads per day, making x number of cold calls, making at least x number of sales pitches. Lag indicators are the results that follow the lead indicators, i.e. number of sales, amount of revenue, etc. What’s truly powerful about harnessing the power of data is that once you know your lead indicators well enough, you can shift the focus from rewarding lag indicators to rewarding the lead indicators. A system like this allows you to reward the behaviors that drive results, rather than just the results themselves.
