SMEs: The Most Important Data For Business Growth.

Growing a successful business is a big challenge as it requires so many inputs, dedication, good foresight, and data-driven decisions. Hence, it doesn’t matter how you generate your revenue: either by rendering services or selling products, you need to collect, store, and manage certain data in order to gain more insight to improve your business.

Importance of Data

Everything is about data especially in this 21st century and data will continue to be gold as a lot can be done if properly analyzed using data analytic tools. As business owners, it is important to be on top of the data generated from doing your business which is readily available but needs to be tracked.

Taking a critical look at the data tells a story of where your business has been, the current state and also predicts where the business will be in the nearest future.

Some recommended data to be tracked by a business owner and how they can help you in business growth are listed below;

Your customers' information which can include;

• The age distribution (age group).
• Where they are based (location).
• The time/season of buying (peak period of sales).
• Other information like name, email, a phone number is also a good one with customer feedback.

Customer feedback:

This will help to better improve the product or services rendered. Customer feedback is to be taken seriously, be evaluated and prioritized to ensure every customer gets a better value of the product/service.

Operational expenses:

which include all expenses incurred in running the business (office supplies, professional fees, rent, and others).

Revenue:

Knowing the number of paying customers, the average amount paid by customers.

Importance of Keep These data:

Analyzed data of your customers will help in customer segmentation and identifying who your direct target audience are, the demography where your service/product is being used and the best advertisement/marketing channel to acquire new customers.

These data is pivotal in your business expansion strategies as you won’t have to re-target markets that your product is already strong in.

Customer feedback is a good one to track as the feedback are based on customer engagement with your product or services. Customer feedback will be a guide on improving your product or services.

Every business owner must also keep a tab of their business expenses. This helps in knowing what and what sucks the cash. Pre-determining your monthly expenses (budgeting/burn rate) will help to reduce overspending of money as the focus will be on what matters in generating revenue.

In addition, identifying the customers paying for your service or product helps to know the kind of customers to target and how to focus on adding value to them which will increase the revenue either through up-selling or cross-selling. Measuring your revenue will help in identifying the churn customers and how to prevent a high churn rate for the future.

Other than these, there are different data business owners can track and analyze to make a smart decision for their business but with these basic ones, you are sure of knowing the most important information of your business growth. Most of the time, you can use several tools to track this information and drop it in your business data room for future references or usage.

This article was written by Niyi Adegboye