Sitting on data is a violation

I'm sure all business owners have heard this term before; Data is the new oil. I'm not sure how many of them understood and started using the new oil. We've heard countless stories about how companies like Amazon, Noon, Uber, AirBnB are analyzing the data they collect and buy. We know how these companies know our next move and how they track us not only online but also when we move in and out of countries.

Small and medium businesses have wrongly assumed that big data is for big companies, but this is not true. There are costs associated with data mining, but the benefits can easily outweigh the costs if the right questions are answered.

You don't have to look far to find the data that resides in your organization. A potential dataset is available in your:

• Sales invoices
• Inquiries and leads

Sales invoices in your ERP are the only source for growing your business. Some very simple analysis can help identify trends in terms of product mix, customer habits and sales efforts. Data analytics helps in looking at data through different lenses and sometimes helps uncover hidden relationships between products and sales efforts.

Identifying high and low potential customers is possible based on an understanding of their product mix and account aging analysis. It also allows you to predict customer churn and seasonal spend.

Inquiry and lead data helps analyze customer behavior and your sales response. Lead sources combined with lead aging can give you insight into future sales revenue. The conversion rate between different products and sellers can help with motivation and effort issues. Conversion rate and source potential help drive future marketing trends.

This analysis can easily be done using a popular tool like Microsoft Power BI. It takes a bit of effort to learn, but once you get your data into the right table or enable data connections to your database, you're almost there. A consultancy like ours can help you set up your data environment and create a few reports to get you started.

Stand up and look at the data you've been sitting on for a long time. The good news is that it is now large enough to make better predictions. Get started today.