One of the most controversial topics regarding the success in the business world is the one of the so-called ‘gut feeling’. While it is true that a lot of people made a fortune following their intuition, there is a lot of debate on what this gut-feeling really is. The closest thing to an explanation would be to say that the gut-feeling is an ability to match a current situation with a similar successful or unsuccessful scenario from your past. In other words, instead of relying on luck or some mystical force, you are subconsciously analysing the current situation and making decisions based on it.
The greatest problem with this is that in order to take full advantage of your intuition, you need to have a lot of previous experience. Luckily, in 2017, you can use digital tools to make up for it. With the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data, you can achieve an unparalleled level of business analysis and estimation even as a layman entrepreneur. Here are a few other benefits given by Panorama, of implementing BI into your startup or SMB structure.
Improved customer experience
As Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. When it comes to your business, it is all about customer experience. If the overall impression someone has by the end of your deal is a positive one, you have a serious chance at turning them into a return customer. To stress just how important this is, about 8 percent of your regulars are capable of generating as much as 40 percent of your entire income. Needless to say, BI can help make your customer experience data-driven and, thus, more reliable and consistent.
Planning for the future
While it is always better to succeed than to fail, sometimes, heading into a massive popularity or workload boom can be a bad thing. Accepting more work than you can handle will result in either letting some of your clients down or, even worse, become a massive drop in the overall quality of your work. This is where BI comes in handy, as with good BI tools you can get simple and fast development estimates, usually displayed via a detailed dashboard or a simple infographic.
Researching your competition
One popular proverb (attributed to various authors) claims that stealing from one source is plagiarism while stealing from many is research. Sometimes, all you have to do in order to figure out a growing trend or find a loophole that you can take an advantage of, is take a look at your competition. By monitoring trends, products and customer reactions, you can easily estimate the strength of your competitors and see which of their actions you should avoid, as well as which ones are worth emulating. Furthermore, you also get to compare your current status with theirs and, in this way, get a general idea of where you stand.
No more guesswork
At last, we return to the above-discussed idea of ‘gut feeling’. When someone with a lack of adequate experience or niche-specific knowledge tries to follow their intuition, this mostly ends up being nothing more than guesswork. The mistakes made this way are often expensive, while an unexpected success only encourages this kind of risky behaviour. With BI, on the other hand, you can make data-driven decisions instead. In other words, the less guesswork is involved in your business decisions the more consistent your growth.
Improved pricing strategy
No matter what your product or service is, one of the greatest problems you will have in selling it is – the issue of price. However, there are several factors affecting it. For instance, is your product present on the local market? What is the competition like? Is there an organic need for your product already or do you have to invest in order to create one?
All of this results in different pricing strategies. Penetration pricing is the situation where you start with a price that is so low that it will allow you to penetrate a new market. On the other hand, price skimming starts high and then declines in price over the course of time. This allows it to tap into several demographics and get the most out of them. With the right BI tool, you can get a much more reliable estimate on where to start and when to move to other stages.
Conclusion
Perhaps the greatest misconception when it comes to the BI is that this is something reserved for major corporations and conglomerates. Look at it this way, BI allows you to get the most out of your effort and resources, which is why SMEs and startups can benefit from it even more (proportionally) than their larger counterparts. Moreover, with a plethora of platforms, tools and companies offering these services, never before were all the benefits of BI more accessible than they are today.
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