What if your company could act faster, make smarter decisions, and stay one step ahead of the competition? Sounds great, right? Getting to that point requires an enormous amount of effort, but with business insights, it is possible.
In this blog post, you will discover why actionable business insights matter and how they can impact your organization. Read on to find out more!
Here’s what you’ll read about actionable business insights:
1. The power of actionable business insights
2. Why are actionable business insights so important?
3. How to get actionable business insights?
4. Actionable business insights: key takeaway
The power of actionable business insights
In general, business insights are facts, data, and information that can help you understand your business better. They are often based on data, such as customer purchasing patterns, revenue, and sales. Business insights are critical for any organization because they help decision-makers and managers make better business decisions. They help you understand what’s happening in your industry, company, and overall market.
Actionable business insights are those that encourage you to take instant action, giving you a bunch of valuable findings based on which you can respond to the issues. They allow you to learn about your organization, your customers, and your marketing enabling you to improve what is working and fix what isn’t.
They can give you quick answers to specific questions about your sales, products, and customers that might encourage your immediate action or further investigation to find the reasons behind certain events. Those can be as follows:
- Questions about your sales:
How good are your sales overall? Which channel drives more sales, and which one is a low-performer? What sales channel tends to feature a more considerable average order value?
- Questions about your products:
What products are the most purchased or less purchased? What products do people tend to buy together? What’s your inventory turnover from a sales channel to a sales channel? What products got refunded most often?
- Questions about your customers:
How many returning customers do you have? What’s the average time between purchases? Which customers bring you more profit? Where do your customers come from?
Answering these questions (and it’s not the extensive list of them) can give you those insights into where more effort is needed and what steps to take to improve the situation.
Why are actionable business insights so important?
Actionable business insights empower companies to take fast, informed actions. They are answers to the who, what, when, where, why, and how questions about your company’s performance. Actionable business insights answer these questions so you can take fast action to improve performance. You know where your customers are coming from and why they aren’t buying from you (if they aren’t).
Actionable business insights are not just raw data or high-level information. They are specific details about what is working for your organization and what is not so that you can act on those details quickly. Let’s look at why actionable insights matter for different parts of your business.
Why do actionable business insights matter in marketing?
Insights can drive marketing success. They’re not just about creating new campaigns and ads that drive sales. First thing, they help you understand how your customers think and behave. At this point, insights help you define who your customers are, what they want, and how to reach them more effectively.
Why do business insights matter in finance?
Knowing your company’s financial health can be incredibly helpful in rising above your competitors because it enables the management to make decisions more wisely and get more effective results. And a company that makes the best financial decisions is more likely to win.
Why do business insights matter in supply chain management?
Many organizations are now striving to know who their suppliers are to power up better decisions, control costs, and reduce risks.
How to get actionable business insights?
Actionable business insights are the result of good analysis. You can’t simply take action on anything and everything you find in your company’s data. You have to carefully analyze the data to find the insights that will help you improve your performance. To find actionable business insights, you might want to do the following:
- First, understand the business issue you are trying to solve with your data. What is your goal for analyzing the data? What do you hope to learn from it and why?
- Then, collect the data you need to answer the question about what causes the issue and what can possibly help improve the situation. You can do this by conducting surveys or polls, reviewing your website analytics, or doing other research.
- Then, analyze the data to find the insights.
- Finally, use the insights you find to make changes that will improve your performance.
Actionable business insights: key takeaway
Business insights are critical for any organization because they help decision-makers and managers understand what’s happening in the industry, company, and overall market and make better decisions. At the same time, to be useful, insights need to go beyond reporting on what has happened in the past. They need to be actionable. In other words, give quick answers to the questions about this or that issue or event, encouraging your action.