The State of Your Data

Each industry is unique. Each company within that industry is unique. There are, however, a few shared difficulties that span industries when it comes to leveraging data to make better decisions. The most often issue is access to right information at the right time. This issue is two-fold. One, can you access the information needed to make informed decisions. Two, can said information be retrieved in such a timeframe that the decision can be delayed until this information can be reviewed.

Let’s talk about a real life use case. Let’s say you’re a sales manager and January is a huge promotional month for your company. Your team has put together a spreadsheet with all the normal metrics that are usually tracked. Our goal is to sell 1,000 units this month. We are looking good all month long and the month ends and we hit our sales target, 1008 units sold. Great job everyone! Celebratory drinks on the Sales Manager on Friday afternoon.

Then reality hits and the Finance Manager comes in the next month and shows a dip in revenue. Why is there a dip in revenue? We hit our sales target. Yes, there were over a 1,000 units sold in January. However, since the sales team was so focused on unit sales they sold a greater quantity of discounted memberships. Although we hit our unit mark, our expected revenue is well below what it should be. How did this happen? Well we were tracking the right metric but it wasn’t the only metric that needed attention. Since we didn’t have eyes into the complete sales picture we missed this shortcoming. Had we been tracking units and unit rates we would have been able to spot the shortfall early in the month and corrected the course. Had we calculated the normal percentage of discounted units to full-pay we could have had a benchmark to monitor.

Stories like this one are far too common and can be prevented. Sometimes you only need to answer one question. Most times you need to answer several, to get to the right information, to truly have a handle on the trajectory of your organization. What is the state of data within your organization? What is being done about it? Don’t repeat past mistakes; venture to make new ones.

- Dee