The success of any business is directly proportional to how well it can evaluate and use data that it collates from its business activities like marketing, sales, etc. All businesses need listening posts that help keep track of key actionable metrics. Big businesses have the assets to custom develop, implement and manage diverse essential tools that help them analyze and evaluate critical business data for business benefit.
Startups on the other hand have limited resources to assign to this business critical task, and therefore they need a tool that helps them track, monitor and make sense of all their business data from one place. A business dashboard like Cyfe makes for the perfect choice; such business dashboards are like the Big Brother that monitors all your sales and marketing activities on the web, measures your performance, tracks KPIs, and acts as the ultimate listening post that helps you "hear" everything and anything that your target audience is talking about startup.
Data and the All-in-One Dashboard
As a startup, you will need to make sense of vast amounts of data. If you want to steer your startup in the right direction, you will need to collate all this data at one place and must be able to make sense of its various complexities quickly, in real time to kick start the process of decision making. This isn't possible without making use of a business dashboard.
Let's take a closer look at the kind of data that your startup needs to contend with:
- You need to track new signups, app downloads and subscriptions and other KPIs in real time - To know whether your startup is beginning to deliver returns or not
- You must monitor brand mentions and followers on social media networks - To know whether your startup's brand has gone viral or not
- You need to monitor your marketing efforts like SEO, SEM etc. - To know whether your campaigns are working or not
- You need to view your sales goals, latest opportunities, list of new customers etc. - To know whether your sales targets are being achieved or not
- You also need to track your web analytics - To control your online presence and check its performance
- You also need to monitor website performance - To make sure the user experience is of the highest quality
This is just a small sampling of all the data that your startup needs to manage in order to be an effective presence in its niche. A business dashboard makes sure that you get your hands on all the data that matters under one roof and it also makes sure that the data is meaningfully visualized. Meaning it can be interpreted at a glance.
So, how does your startup profit from using a business dashboard? That's the critical question isn't it? Take a look:
Make better business decisions by tracking the data that matters
Decision making is always data driven. In a hyper active business environment, you are going to have data coming at you from all directions. At one end, you will have information about your sales numbers at another you will be swamped with results from specific marketing campaigns; the data will just keep on coming. Much of this data is unstructured and unorganized. To make sense of this data, and pick the relevant details essential for sound decision making will be next to impossible. But a business dashboard will help you separate wheat from the chaff.
It will help you separate mission critical from inconsequential data to help you make better sense of it. This allows you to use data to make informed decisions, which are better placed to boost your startup's growth figures.
A Bird's Eye View of your Business Activities and their Performance
The bane of startups is the limited financial strength and man power, which at times can hamper their ability to improve business performance. Startups face problems if and when they cannot manage and control their various business activities. But an all-in-one business dashboard allows startups to get an overview of their business activities from one place. As they say, the view from the top is always good, and this statement can be applied to your business dashboard as well. You get better clarity about your business and where it's headed, which help you get a better hold on things. The idea is to use a dashboard to improve your business capabilities. You will know what is needed to get the results you are looking and will be able to meet your business goals.
For e.g. If you want to take a look at your latest sales opportunities you can do so, and put in place an effective Plan of Action to tap these opportunities to improve your sales figures; all because of your business dashboard.
Predictive Actionable Business Intelligence
Look beyond traditional business intelligence towards predictive business intelligence. A business dashboard allows you to evaluate current business data alongside historical information to predict changes in your business environment. This helps you take a series of actions that will future proof your startups against the whimsies of buyer behavior. Agreed, the very word 'predictive' means there isn't any surety that the things you have planned for, will come to pass; but if your predictions are backed by solid analytics, you will definitely be able to position your business to meet the needs of the future. This will give you a leg up over your competition for sure.
Future data based decisions will be based on forecasting ability and what better way to prep up for this scenario, then using your business dashboard to predict the possible business challenges that your business will have to meet in the near future.
Improved Business Performance
It all boils down to this. All information that your business dashboard makes available to you helps your startup improve its business performance. It can arrest negative trends by identifying them, localizing them and getting rid of them. We have already talked about how it helps make better decisions, but what it also does is that it enables us to improve existing decisions. A comprehensive dashboard also provides actionable intelligence on the business's performance. It provides you with a well-rounded picture about the company's performance, enabling you to plug its inefficiency. You can minimize presumptive losses and take steps to improve earnings.
End Words
At the end of the day, you can describe all the benefits of a business dashboard using one phrase, 'Performance Management'. It helps you manage business performance by offering compartmentalized information based on various growth oriented parameters. Whatever data you need to kick start your startup's growth is available, that is of course if you use a business dashboard that can track extensive online data.