There are two key components impacting your bottom line: profits and expenses. To increase your bottom line, you must increase your profits and/or lower your expenses. This isn’t the easiest accomplishment, but it’s not rocket science either. Before you roll out a new product or marketing campaign, take some time out for data analytics. The following shows you how data mining and analytics can increase your bottom line by helping you become more efficient while also determining new ways you can increase your profits.
Learn Everything You Can about Your Customer’s Experience
Can you be certain you’re meeting your customer’s expectations? If you were certain would you even be reading this? Your customers and account managers can be audited for quality assurance. Regular, professional customer experience analysis is what you need to determine how your customers are benefiting from your product or service, and whether or not you’re meeting their expectations.
By participating in regular audits, you’ll learn exactly what your customers value about you. Your account managers will also answer questions that diagnose why value is occurring or not occurring. Ultimately, the results of the analysis will tell you how to retain customers and grow your business and thus increase your revenue.
Build Your Business with Regular Win-Loss Reviews
Regularly analyzing your wins and losses can increase your customer retention and lead conversion rates, specifically in the B2B selling arena. According to the Aberdeen Group, companies that participate in win-loss reviews outperform those that don’t. Specifically, companies that don’t mine this data only retain about 48 percent of their customers, while those who participate in win-loss analytics typically retain 60 percent of their customers. Moreover, lead conversion rates jump to 23 percent compared to just 17 percent from companies that don’t participate in analytics.
Mine Big Data to Cut Costs
Profits are more valuable when they’re not spent on business expenses; so, by decreasing your expenses, you’re actually increasing your bottom line. Collect data on everything and anything to create a sort of history of your processes, and then use this history to determine where to make cuts or improve efficiency.
Intel is a great example of a company that mines big data and predictive analysis to save on expenses. Beginning in 2012, the company began reducing testing time on its chips. Before analyzing the historical data, Intel did a quality check on each and every chip, but after mining and analyzing the data it was determined that some chips did not require testing time. Ultimately, the effort ended up saving Intel $3 million in manufacturing costs the first year and has continued to be an effective way to cut costs.
Use Tech to Save Time and Money
It’s important to use technology to your benefit, such as using data applications to improve your employee’s workflow and record customer buying habits. This information will help you improve efficiency later, but also is useful for on-the-go data collection and storage. Many applications will analyze the data, so you don’t have to. Keep in mind, some data collection is best performed by third-party professionals (customer experience analysis and win-loss reviews).
If you collect and store data on everything, you’re going to start to see patterns, which will give you the power to make change. You can collect data on marketing campaigns, and determine exactly how many customers a particular campaign converted. It can be leveraged to determine inefficiencies in workflow, as well as inefficiencies in manufacturing, shipping, and receiving. By employing changes and continuing to manage and leverage data, your business will stay competitive for the long term.
