You can get overwhelmed with data from your prospects, customers, and online presence. The plethora of information causes many businesses to do one of two things: freeze up with data paralysis or lack focus, wasting time and resources.
To make your analysis worth the time you put in, focus only on the truly helpful metrics. What items would be most useful in monthly business reviews? Focus on those specific few will cut wasted time and data frustration.
This guest blog article from Zapier, goes into more detail to help you set up a working program. It offers one super-tip that makes so much sense you wish you would have thought of it – Decide on a unique ID that will identify each customer. Your CRM or accounting software may have such an ID automatically generated. Add this ID to your other programs as a tag. Why? Customers use multiple emails and versions of their name. If you want to line up the data between two different systems, like CRM and billing, this ID can help you pair the data.
To do early on with data collection and analysis.
- Start collecting data now.
- Be clear on what you want to measure.
- Include a unique ID for each customer in all apps. Use automation tools to add the ID to eliminate human error.
- Include purchase details in your billing for future reference.
- Implement a simple sale attribution model – a unique tag for the marketing source.
- Stay organized; introduce a straightforward format, and adjust your data to this format to make plotting charts and working this dataset easier.
- Know your source of truth. If two systems disagree, know out which is providing the reliable answer, making corrections easier.
