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How to get your decision making right first time

Data is central to running a business in the modern world, it’s all around us. In fact, everyday approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are created! That is a mind-blowing amount of data and it’s waiting at your fingertips. 

Data is one of the most valuable assets to a business, but in many cases, it is not being utilised and businesses are failing to maximise it. 

When used right, data can be critical in helping you to make better business decisions, and importantly, getting those decisions right the first time. Businesses have to make large and small decisions everyday yet research has found only 20% of business owners think they are good at it and 44% believe decision making is too difficult. These are sobering statistics, but the good news is there is something you can do about it. Within this blog post we’re going to examine how you can improve your decision making by using your data to make easier, quicker, and smarter decisions.

Value data from the top

If you’re a leader who values data and advocates the importance of data, then you’ll create a culture within your business where analysing data is a core undertaking. Effective business leaders will harness data and analytics to make better decisions right from the top and encourage their teams to do the same. 

Put your teams to work

With many business areas now being automated, it frees up your employee’s time to understand the data in front of them, learn about the key challenges facing the business, the opportunities available and identify areas to improve. Getting input from various departments and empowering your employees will not only be a great motivator, but it will give you a wide range of varied inputs from the people the decisions impact to help you make more considered decisions.

Equip your workforce with reporting tools

To empower your teams to analyse data and support overall business decision making you must ensure they are equipped with robust tools to help them do just that. Collecting data from multiple sources, and collaborating it can be time consuming, complicated, and misrepresentative. Instead, focus on one central reporting system which can streamline processes across your entire organisation and drive large amounts of data.

Keep your goals in mind

It’s essential to remember your key business goals when making decisions – if the decision takes you a step closer to your objectives then it’s a good indication that it’s the correct choice to make.

Learn from the past

As the saying goes “we learn from our mistakes” but we also learn from what went well too. When making decisions consider what was learnt from the past in similar situations to help you put resilient strategies in place.

Conduct testing

In some circumstances the best way to make a decision is to experiment and run some rapid market testing of a new product, for example, which will give you data to help make informed marketing decisions around pricing etc.

Analyse your data carefully

Data can be your own worse enemy sometimes due to the sheer volumes available to us now and often quality over quantity comes to the fore. There is little point having excess data if you don’t listen to it properly. Here are some tips to help you get the most value from your data:

• Use your sales data to examine the health of your company. For example what is working well, what isn’t. Which products sell best? Do you need to readjust your marketing campaigns or allocate more budget to a particular campaign. Leverage this data to identify new opportunities.
• Use your financial data to understand your current position, identify risks and conduct three dimensional forecasting such as cash, revenue and sales forecasting.
• Use customer data to better understand your customers and your target market to improve customer service and targeting, produce personalised offers and understand which part of your customer base provides the largest proportion of your revenue. 
• Internal data can be used to analyse your employee base, their motivations, skillsets and weaknesses. This can help you make meaningful decisions to drive change within your business internally. 

Final thoughts…

There is no escaping decision making when you run a business, and unfortunately there is a great deal of pressure to get those decisions right first time round, otherwise the consequences could be costly. The good news is, in the modern business world, you have masses of data all around you waiting to be analysed such as sales and marketing, internal human resources data, financial and customer data – it’s at your fingertips to help you make insightful, decisive and meaningful decisions.

Enforcing data driven decision making is vital, and empowering this from the top will build a culture within your business where data analysing is a core undertaking. However, equipping your workforce with a robust centralised reporting system is essential for accurate and collaborative decision making. 

For more information about the reporting solutions available from Pegasus Software, and how they can improve your decision making, get in touch today.

Posted On: August 01, 2023