We have seen some great examples of coronavirus content from remote work wikis, to helpful resource collection pages, and even some good news to keep spirits up – and we want to focus on supporting individuals and organizations who want to create content hubs to help their local communities. 

As individuals who want to help in this difficult time, it can be difficult to know what to do or find ways to get involved, especially while remaining isolated to flatten the curve. 

Whether it is finding the local restaurants that are open and offering takeout or no-contact delivery, helping people who have lost their main source of income find local jobs, or highlighting volunteer opportunities (many of which are deemed essential activities and will allow you to still leave your house) – information is critical. 

Here is a takeout dashboard one of our team members has created to share with their neighbors, and this only an example. We want to do more than scratch the surface, which is where you come in. You know your communities the best, so we are going to provide free Cyfe plans with extended capabilities to help you create the dashboards that will help people find the information they need. Let’s see how many can we make to support our communities!

Share your dashboard with us, and we will highlight it on our blog and social media channels to extend your reach and help get your information in front of the people who need it most.  

Let us know what your ideas are, and how we can help or if there is anything else you need. A few other ideas and data sources we have been working on:

• Finding restaurants that are coming up with creative solutions (offering drive throughs or meal-kit delivery)
• Finding businesses who have been hit especially hard to donate to or buy gift cards from (Here are two examples, local Seattle favorites that were hit especially hard and queer businesses across the globe)
• Coronavirus side hustles – essential work that will help boost your income
• Gofundme campaigns that support your local area 
• Blood drives or other volunteer opportunities (here is a Seattle data source)
• Free/discounted services for small businesses
• Traffic cams to help identify the safest time to go to the grocery store
• The best memes or tweets that are circling to help lighten spirits

To access an enhanced free account that allows multiple dashboards and 30 configured widgets – sign up for a free account, log-in, and click here.  You should see a success message and be ready to go! If there is anything else you need, please reach out to us at support@cyfe.com.

The post Crowdsourcing Goodwill with Cyfe appeared first on Cyfe.

The contact form is usually seen as an afterthought — a quick “for more information, contact us” line you throw together while creating your website.

Truth is, your contact form is valuable website real estate that welcomes people to your company, creates a first impression, encourages someone to reach out, and turns anonymous website visitors into qualified leads. 

Aside from writing a catchy call-to-action, how else can you optimize your contact us form to make the most of your marketing efforts? 

Table of Contents

What is a contact form?

A contact form is a set of questions on your site that lets visitors reach out to customer support or a person from your company. Often, a contact form is placed at the bottom of key website pages to capture lead information.  

Your contact can include a short message encouraging website visitors to reach out, field forms to collect information such as name, email, etc., and a call-to-action. Remember, your contact form is what people look at when deciding to contact your business or not — so make every piece of information you collect count. 

What your contact form needs to achieve

It may not seem like you have much room to work with when you consider everything your form should accomplish. Useful contact forms will: 

• explain why the website visitor should contact you and motivate them to get in touch
• avoid necessary information, focusing on explaining how someone can communicate with your company
• showcase your brand’s personality, matching your style and voice to the rest of your site and social media profiles
• offer a few ways to contact you, whether it’s through Live Chat, Messenger, phone, or email
• set the right expectations for visitors, reassuring them you’ll contact them back. 

Fortunately, there’s are ton of different ways you can boost the effectiveness of your contact form, and create a lead generation process that helps visitors quickly get in touch with your business and take further action. The tips below will help you convert more site visitors with an optimized contact form. 

How to create the best contact form for your site

Since you only have a limited amount of working space, there are a few objectives you should prioritize in your contact form before you send it live.

1. Show visitors your brand’s personality

However you choose to convey it, the first thing your contact form needs to achieve is showing some personality.  When visitors find your contact form after scrolling through your site, you need to give them a reason to stay. As with most attention spans, you won’t have their interest for too long, so be concise and to the point, with a splash of personality and quirkiness.  For many companies, such as TearDwn in the example below, that means using a conversational tone to convince people to get in touch:

Your contact form doesn’t have to be just fill-in-the box fields. You can make it stand out by:

• using one call-to-action (CTA) that prompts an email.
• asking a question in your headline
• re-ensuring prospects they’re in good hands with a guarantee

2. Add social media links

The contact form on your website isn’t the only way people can get in touch or learn more about you. If you have social media profiles or specific locations a person can go to, include it in your contact form. Just add it to the bottom as you fill out the content of the form. Yeti, for example, uses it’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and a Live Chat on its contact page to offer alternative lines of communication.

This actively encourages potential customers to get in touch on channels they’re most comfortable, plus, can get drive traffic to your social platforms for further discovery.

3. Create a visually appealing form to encourage contact

To give visitors extra incentive to provide you with their details, invest in a well-designed form. Marvel does this with their contact form, keeping it minimal with visual breaks and space, as well as an eye-catching illustration:

4. Consider a full contact page

A contact page is an extension of your form that lets you add extra information and be more flexible in your design. These contact pages can often include an FAQ and an address for people to come and stop by.  Ella’s Kitchen has built a strong contact page mainly due to design and the amount of useful information. The infant food producer covers multiple ways for parents to get in touch for different reasons including shop orders, press inquiries, and even links out to a different contact form for general inquiries. 

5. Personalize your contact form

Personalization is an essential part of your contact form, and using the word “you” can help improve conversion rates. You can go more in-depth with logic and dynamic content, but leveraging good messaging can be equally as effective.

6. Collect relevant lead information

It’s extremely common that visitors will contact your company for a specific reason, but it’s not always easy to communicate it without the proper form fields. That’s why it’s important to collect information, whether it’s timeline, budget, project type, email, etc. Many companies add multiple choice and free text by default to help potential leads share their needs, like this example from RFTB: 

You can also ask for:

• business type
• website URL
• company name
• job role
• number of employees

Just make sure you only ask for information that’s necessary. Forms between 5 to 10 fields tend to convert better than outlying numbers.   

Contact form ideas: 5 Best Examples

1. VentureHarbour

Digital innovation studio and technology company VentureHarbour offers a free marketing proposal in exchange for contact details. Its contact form asks questions that helps the company get a feel for who the lead is. It also adds social proof of their services by highlighting a testimonial on the form.

2. Single Grain

Marketing agency Single Grain qualified two types of leads on their lead generation form: people who want to pay for services, and people who just want information. This helps them segment leads into different nurture sequences and build a relationship by sending helpful content. The language is clear and concise, and is centered around the visitor to encourage action. 

3. Marketing Automation Insider (MAI)

Marketing Automation Insider makes major use of it’s homepage, leading site visitors into a contact form through a tool they made, and a guide on how to choose the best automation tools for their needs. The form collects an email address in order to send the guide. 

4. Leadformly

Leadformly has taken an anti form approach to link customers to support, using a chatbot to let people contact the company. It uses live human agents and if they are outside office hours, the bot will collect an email address for the team to reach out when they’re back.

5. 360i

360i uses its contact form to help segment leads by their needs. Its dropdown bar provides different reasons to get in touch, with simple text inputs and a dash of brand personality. You can also subscribe to the company’s blog from the form. 

Making the most of your contact form

As you go on creating lead generation processes and updating your website — be sure to keep your contact form in mind. Potential leads are bound to fill it out if they feel they’ll get value out of it. 

With these contact form tips in hand, you can make a powerful impression on behalf of your company and convince website visitors to get in touch with someone from your team. 

The post How to Get Your Contact Form to Convert Visitors appeared first on Cyfe.

Social Media Publisher Widget

The Publisher widget allows you to plan, schedule, and manage your social media campaigns across major social networks. The widget supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest out of the box and more networks are on the way.

You can publish posts to multiple networks with a click of a button or schedule them weeks or months in advance down to the minute, saving you a ton of time and energy. The widget will also show you the number of interactions each individual post has had to help you determine its effectiveness.

Cyfe is now truly an all-in-one business dashboard, not only allowing you to monitor and analyze your key performance data, but also schedule, publish, and manage your social media content from under the same roof.

Data Mashup Widget

Effortlessly spot interesting trends and correlations with the new Mashup widget. It allows you to combine or “mash” metrics from different dashboard widgets together. You can add, subtract, multiply, divide, slice and dice unrelated metrics from completely different apps to create brand new business intelligence data for your organization and clients.

Now you can easily answer questions like “What does my social media engagement have to do with my Salesforce leads?”, “What do my web analytics have to do with the top of my CRM funnel?”, and many more. Whether you’re looking to compare your Google Analytics visitors against your Twitter mentions or combine data from multiple Facebook Pages, the Mashup widget has you covered.

Alerts Feature

Reap the benefits of Cyfe while you’re offline. Alerts allow you to monitor metrics even when you’re away from your dashboards. You can set up email or SMS notifications to go out when certain conditions are met (e.g. when your website’s traffic level drops or when there’s a surge in Twitter followers thanks to your brilliant social media campaign).

Whether you’re looking to get clients excited about an upcoming milestone or prevent mishaps, the Alerts feature will give you peace of mind by acting as a car or house alarm for your entire business!

Goals Feature

Goals allow you to benchmark metrics against your business objectives (e.g. whether your sales team hits their daily quota). It’s a great way to identify areas of improvement within your organization.

With the Goals feature you can set on-screen indicators that help easily communicate and visualize specific goals to your team and clients, and see how close you are to achieving them. It’s a perfect way to boost morale and keep your team informed with maximum accountability (they work on your big screen too).

Other Updates

Core Product & Widgets: We’ve also been busy enhancing the performance and speed of the overall app. In addition, we’ve updated existing widgets like iTunes Connect, Google AdSense, Xero, and MailChimp.

New Knowledge Base: In a hurry? Now you can instantly get answers to some of the most popular support questions here.

250,000 Users
Lastly, we wanted to announce that we’ve hit a new milestone… over 250,000 users! Thanks to all of you for using and supporting Cyfe. Rest assured that we will continue to serve you to the best of our ability!

What are you waiting for? Log into Cyfe and check out these new features for yourself!

Happy Cyfing!

The post Cyfe 3: Social Publishing, Mashups, Alerts, Goals & More appeared first on Cyfe.

While many businesses rely on a recurring revenue (or retainer) business model, software as a service businesses almost exclusively rely on it. It’s something that can be a huge benefit, but also a huge problem if a customer isn’t happy with the service shortly after signing up. Due to the increasing costs of acquiring a customer (across all industries) because of continuously increasing competition, SaaS companies are investing more in customer acquisition. This isn’t necessarily a big issue if the company delivers on its promises and keeps their customers happy. Doing so increases the customer lifetime value (CLV) and the longer a customer is with a SaaS company, the more the profit margin increases. The problem comes in when a customer leaves the SaaS company within a short period of time after signing up. When this happens it is possible (even likely) that the company lost money on that customer.

Due to this unique business model, SaaS companies need to monitor several specific SaaS metrics in order to make sure they’re operating profitably, adding new customers, retaining their current customer base, and spending their money wisely.

Let’s dive into four must have SaaS metrics that your software as a service company should be monitoring very, very closely.

1. LTV

Due to the recurring nature of SaaS, you can’t simply look at what you charge a new client to onboard and their monthly fee as their value. You’ve got to consider the lifetime value of each customer to get a much clearer picture of what that customer is worth to your business. Depending on your type of model, MRR or ARR (monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue), you’ll likely calculate the lifetime value of your customers a little differently. With an MRR model, you’re likely charging your customers on a month to month basis (though you may have a contract in place for a year or longer). With an ARR model, you’re charging your customers once per year (likely with just a one year agreement).

No matter the way you have structured your business and fee schedule, your customer lifetime value is one that can’t be overlooked. You need to understand how much the average customer is worth to you over the entire time they work with you. Let’s calculate that number…

For MRR:

LTV = [(Avg. Monthly Transactions X Avg. Order Value) Avg. Gross Margin] x Avg. Lifespan in Months

For ARR:

LTV = [(Avg. Annual Transactions X Avg. Order Value) Avg. Gross Margin] X Avg. Lifespan in Years

This metric is actually one that may change over time as you get (hopefully) better at pleasing your customers and they hang around longer. It can also change if the cost of your services increases or decreases or if your costs change. We recommend monitoring this value closely and recalculating it on a quarterly basis to have as accurate of information as possible throughout the year.

PRO TIP: Set up a Google Spreadsheet that calculates the time each customer has been with you as well as their monthly or annual costs. Doing this, you’ll easily be able to monitor your LTV throughout the year. You can also set that sheet to feed into your business analytics dashboard.

2. CAC

Now let’s talk about adding new customers. Adding a new customer is NEVER free, especially in the SaaS world. With so much competition out there in every SaaS niche and market, monitoring your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is vital to your success. Your CAC is the average cost that you’ll pay to acquire one new customer. This can be in the form of advertising costs, marketing, time spent, and more.

If you’re a SaaS startup, you’re likely underestimating this metric because you’re blinded by how excited you are about your software. You’re likely expecting customers to adopt your software at a higher rate than they actually will and thus underestimating your costs. Especially in the startup phase of your SaaS company, you can’t afford to be overly optimistic, you need to rely on hard data in order to stay in business and become profitable. Let’s take a look at how to compute this number.

CAC = (Sum of all Sales & Marketing Expenses) / (Number of new customers added)

This is another metric that you should be monitoring constantly because it will also likely change fairly frequently as your marketing and sales expenses increase or decrease and as your business is introduced to the market. Especially in the early years, your CAC will likely fluctuate almost daily!

3. LTV:CAC

Probably the most important ratio that you need to understand in your SaaS business is your customer lifetime value to your customer acquisition costs. This ratio will give you an honest evaluation of the viability of your business (which is very important in when you’re starting up a new SaaS company). Many businesses, especially in the tech space, rely on investment money early and don’t start producing a profit until around year four, but relying on that investment money without understanding when (and if) you will ever turn a profit is playing with fire. So many businesses in the SaaS space flame out due to not understanding the viability or LTV to CAC ratio of their business.

So, really there are two pieces to this pie. You need to understand your customer lifetime value and how it relates to your customer acquisition costs (hopefully it’s a positive number!) and you also need to understand how long it will take to recover the CAC spent to acquire each customer.

Let’s do an example to illustrate:

Say you figure out that you’re spending on average $300 to acquire a new customer (using the equation above) and your average customer lifetime value is $1,500, you can calculate your LTV to CAC value as 5x.

But is 5x a good or bad ratio? This means that your business is making five times what you’re spending on each customer to acquire them. Obviously, the higher this ratio, the better and more successful your business will be.  As a good rule of thumb, a viable SaaS company should have a LTV to CAC ratio of 3x or greater.

Next you want to determine the time it will take to recover the amount spent on acquiring the average customer. In order to do this you’ll need to calculate the average gross margin (which you did to get your customer lifetime value) and map it out until you reach your break even point.

So, say you have an average monthly gross revenue of $100 per new customer, you can see that it will take you three months to recover the investment that you paid in order to acquire that new customer. As another rule of thumb, you should shoot to recover your investment within the first year.

Now, taking this data back to our first point, if you are to lose this customer within the first two months, you are losing money on that customer.

4. MRR or ARR Churn

Like we talked about earlier, we want to make sure that customers are staying with your SaaS company for as long as possible because the longer that they are with you, the higher your margins will be.

In order to understand your lost business, you’ll need to calculate your monthly recurring revenue or annual recurring revenue churn rate. This is a calculation of what percentage of revenue was not renewed or was cancelled throughout the year (or quarter or month).

MRR Churn can be calculated as follows: (substitute ARR if needed)

MRR Churn = (∆MRR cancelled contracts) / (∆t X MRR total)

Essentially, here if you have $1,000,000 in monthly recurring revenue at the beginning of the quarter and 2 of your customers cancel or don’t renew and they represent $200,000 in MRR, your quarterly MRR churn is 20% (which is extremely high).

As your business grows, becomes more sophisticated, and better understands your customers you should be able to increase the lifetime of your customer as well as decrease your MRR churn rate, at least those should be goals that are very high on your priority list.

Now, that we’ve gone through our top four must have SaaS metrics that you should be monitoring, you need a place to actually monitor those metrics, right? Get started with Cyfe now for FREE! Build out your SaaS metrics dashboard right within Cyfe and feed information from over 200,000 applications to help you seamlessly calculate and monitor these metrics!

The post 4 Must Have SaaS Metrics for Your Software as a Service Company appeared first on Cyfe.

Metrics may be applied to help improve any and every part of the business process from sales and marketing to human resources, productivity, and finance. There is no need to take a best guess when data is precisely pointing us in the best direction.

The key here is that when used properly, analytics save us the two most important components of business: time and money. Assuming you’re interested in both of those assets, read on…!

What Are Business Intelligence Data Points?

Good question — what do we mean when we’re talking about business intelligence? Investopedia defines business intelligence as a “… a broad term that encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, descriptive analytics, etc. ”

While entirely accurate, that sounds a bit complicated, so to simplify, business intelligence (often referred to as BI) data points focus mostly on internal company processes. We will specifically focus on project management, the sales cycle, and finance, but understand that business intelligence data points may reach far beyond this scope. It all comes down to your company’s unique mission, goals, and key performance indicators.

How to Improve Business Decisions with Business Intelligence Data Points

For better or worse, the numbers don’t lie. Once business goals are defined, targets are either hit or missed. Sure, the goal may change, but knowing exactly where the company lands is essential in measuring success, finding out what to improve, and achieving continued growth.

Pro tip: Useful at-a-glance metrics are by default immediately actionable. So, take action!

Project Management

Measuring and analyzing project management data points are essential to any successful business running any type of project from agile scrum and product development to the most basic of event planning or coordination. Finding opportunities to leverage project management productivity can be a tremendous cost- and time-saving endeavor as it speeds up processes and boosts efficiencies.

Here are a few key metrics worth analyzing and reasons why you should be monitoring them.

1. Task management and to do’s:

This may seem straightforward, but tracking tasks and due dates, while seemingly the most simple of organizational procedures, often gets left behind when multiple people and teams are working fast on various projects. Task management analytics help people stay on track, prevents blockers, and holds everyone accountable throughout the project until it is complete. Tracking these data points additionally makes for easy project review when looking at lessons learned and potential improvements for next time.

2. Time management:

Track how much time is needed for each task. Be sure you are charging or paying for your time accordingly and always be sure of where the overall timeline of the project stands. With accurate information, you can manage overall timeline expectations and adjust the scope of the project accordingly. For many businesses, charging by the hour is the norm and accurately tracking your hours will help you to provide more accurate and profitable estimates and proposals in the future.

3. Benchmarking:

Most projects require benchmarking or healthy baseline check ups before, during, and even after developing particular tasks. Use business intelligence metrics to track competitors and analyze audience or potential customer data. Uncover user-persona trends that may inform your business’ marketing and sales strategy. Maintain a dashboard that holds this information so that it may be easily shared among your team members and other key stakeholders.

The Sales Cycle

Here’s a glimpse of a business intelligence analytics dashboard from Cyfe that showcases the kinds of sales cycle metrics worth tracking to find pockets of growth potential. This particular dashboard is showcasing a sample company’s sales metrics.

Now let’s break some of business intelligence analytics down into actionable insights.

4. Top sales representatives (measured by total earned company revenue): Knowing (and not guessing) which sales representatives land squarely in, for example, the top ten percent of total company revenue generation will help you make more informed managerial decisions. And these are easier decisions to make because they are based on data. Do you know who your best (and worst) salesmen really are? I’m sure your gut tells you one thing, but the data may actually reveal a different story. Let your analytics tell the true story.

5. Top sales opportunities (determined by total target value):

If you don’t know what your goals are, it’s nearly impossible to achieve them. Use an analytics dashboard to thoroughly understand your target market and share that data with your team in real time. Giving your sales team a better understanding of which prospects and leads are closest to the sale will help them better utilize their time and prioritize bottom of the funnel opportunities.

6. Lead to customer conversion rates: Know your conversion rates. Know your cost per conversion. Use this data to make marketing pivots, personnel shifts, and hiring decisions. Focus your budget on attaining the type of leads that are most likely to convert and do so with confidence. Through this data you’ll be able to identify which types of leads, which sources, and which conversion paths will likely yield more customers.

7. New customer acquisition: Learn when and from where your customers are being acquired. Tweak your sales and marketing strategies accordingly so that you can get the most bang for your buck. For example, if you find that yours is a seasonally based business and that the majority of your new customers sign up during the summer months, target that time to give your branding a boost.

Finance

Maintaining a healthy financial status is the ultimate goal of business. It’s a simple formula — make more than you’re spending. But when companies fail to make time to properly track financial business intelligence data points, they fail. Here are some key financial metrics to know and some insights that will drive success…

8. Business expenses: If you don’t know what is being spent, you’re in trouble. Properly sorted data points will analyze business expenditures broken down by department, team, and even individual. Use metrics to discover where cash is moving and to determine if it’s being appropriately allocated and spent.

9. Invoices: Be sure to get paid! By tracking invoice payments and schedules, you’ll know when you are owed money, how much, and by whom. One of the easiest ways for a business to fail is to have lots of overdue accounts receivable. Being too lenient or passive in collecting on your accounts is a recipe for disaster. Understand what you’re owed and implement strategies to get paid, on time.

10. Overall company revenue:  This is a big one, and perhaps it’s a bit obvious, but knowing gross and net total company revenue is a no brainer for any business interested in improvement and growth. Use this metric to learn what company challenges may need immediate attention. It’s important to understand, especially for a brand new business, that sales and revenue are not the same thing as profit. It’s very important to know your gross numbers, but taking it a step further to understand your net sales numbers will help you implement procedures to move into the black.

11. Budgets: While it’s important to understand total company revenue and expenses, the ability to track departmental budgets at-a-glance is incredibly useful in making predictions or when needing to cut costs. Know where the financial health of the business stands at any given point in time. Do you have departments or areas of your business that are surpassing their budgets? How will that be handled when it comes up? Figuring all of this out now will eliminate major issues in the future.

What If the Data is Less Than Stellar?

If the data shows something that you or your CEO doesn’t like — and this will happen — think of it as an opportunity for growth. First, consider shifting perspectives; adjust the date range, change filters, adjust your overlays. (Heck, be sure to check the numbers)!

But mostly, be open and willing to pivot to achieve your business goals. And if your primary business goal is growth, business intelligence analytics is a critically essential way to expand by saving time and money and by discovering ways in which to boost productivity.

Success demands a pointed strategy and the data will get you there, but it also requires finesse along with a healthy dose of creativity. After all, business can’t be entirely black and white. If that were the case, it would be incredibly dull. By its very nature, business will always be at least somewhat fuzzy, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

Get started with Cyfe today for free. Go ahead, give it a try and discover how business intelligence analytics deliver the hard core data needed to grow your business. No credit card. No obligation. Just insight!

The post 11 Ways to Put Your Business Intelligence Analytics to Work Growing Your Company appeared first on Cyfe.

It’s no secret that motivated employees are more productive, happier and all-around better employees. In fact, according to a study done by the University of Warwick, happier employees can improve productivity 10 – 12%

We’ve all dealt with employees who were great at their jobs, and those employees who couldn’t have cared less. If businesses want to maintain a competitive advantage and continue to grow their business, engaging and motivating employees is crucial. Sure there are those employees who are generally enthusiastic, those are the people who are easily motivated and work hard to grow the business regardless of what’s in it for them. But what about those who are less driven overall or cynical by nature? How do you, as an organization, motivate everyone on your team? It might come as a surprise, but utilizing employee data to engage and give ownership to individual employees can be a highly successful, if currently under-utilized approach to employee motivation.

When done in the right way, tracking, analyzing, and sharing employee performance metrics can be hugely beneficial to you, as a business owner, and your staff. We think that the number one reason this is so effective is because data allows you to empower your employees to do their job better and can help encourage them to better feel ownership over their position in helping the company grow. When employees feel as though the organization or job is “theirs,” then they feel a responsibility towards growing the company. This is sometimes referred to as pyschological ownership and many studies have shown that the feeling of ownership is an important indicator of employee motivation and performance.

Ok, but how do you use your data to help motivate and encourage ownership for each and every employee in your organization? Well that really depends on what data points you want to track and how you use those data points to improve performance throughout your business. There are some analytics that will be exceptionally helpful when shared with your team and some that you will want to keep all for yourself.

4 Data Dashboards for Employee Motivation

1. Celebrate Milestones 

You might think that you are great at celebrating your employees, but are you really? Maybe you take them out for lunch on their birthday or give them a big bonus check in December. These are great ways to make them feel special, but you should also be recognizing them for work related milestones. Is Sally’s five year anniversary coming up in May? Did Michael just get promoted to Director of Sales and Marketing? These are great opportunities to recognize your employees for the work they’ve done for you.

How can you keep track of all these milestones? For any date based milestones, consider setting up a dashboard using your Google Calendar. You can put all employees anniversaries, birthdays, etc into your calendar and then create a dashboard so you can get a clear snapshot of upcoming and past events.

2. Recognize Individual Achievements

Employees who are recognized for their work tend to feel more appreciated and have an easier time taking ownership for their portion of the company. So, did David just score a big contract that the company has been working on for six months? Recognize that!

Achievements for individual employees will probably differ based on your company, industry, the employee’s position within the company, etc. One of the most straightforward achievements is sales and it will probably be most relevant to your sales team. Consider building a dashboard that tracks your leads, accounts, opportunities, etc. Whether you choose to share this dashboard with your employees so they can track progress on their own or keep it to yourself is up to you. If you choose to keep it to yourself, however, it’s incredibly important to make sure you’re paying attention and recognizing those achievements. How are you going to motivate your employees using this if you aren’t actually using it?!

By contrast, if you choose to share this dashboard with your sales team, it becomes something that your entire team can regularly reference to see the progress everyone is making on their sales.

Your data dashboard used to recognize individual achievements will differ based on the sales software your organization is using, but here’s an example of a great sales dashboard.

EXPERT TIP: Not sure how to make a dashboard using your sales software? Let us help! Email us at support@cyfe.com and we’ll help you set it up. And if your software isn’t one of our current widgets, we can work with you on that too.

3. Company-wide Achievements

We know that you, as the business owner or department head have ambitious goals you’re striving for each month, quarter, year or however else you measure time in your company, but are you sharing those goals wth your employees? What level of ownership do invidual employees have over the business goals in your company? How are you ensuring that your employees feel like they are contributing to those goals? Sure you are probably tracking your progress towards those goals on a consistent basis, but you should also be sharing that data with your employees! When you share the overall goals of the company with your employees and talk to them about how you plan to reach those goals, you’re bringing them into the fold. You’re basicallly showing them that they are important to helping the company reach it’s overall goals. Remember when we talked about psychological ownership earlier? This is a great way to help give that to your team.

As with #2, your dashboard for this item will need to be pretty custom to your organization. You need to ensure you’ve identified the key performance metricsimportant to your overall goals and build a dashboard around those metrics. Here are a few examples that help measure common KPIs:

Finances

These are helpful for companies who are trying to increase revenue, sales, etc. over a period of time.

Website

Trying to increase your overall website traffic or conversion rate? A marketing dashboard will help you measure the performance of your website.

There are many other KPIs that your company can measure in order to track your overall goals for the year. Just make sure that you’ve identified your goals and the key performance indicators you’ll use to measure them and use that information to set up your dashboards.

EXPERT TIP: Not sure how to choose your KPI’s? Let us help! Check out our FREE The Beginners Guide to Choosing the Right Marketing KPIs for Your Business ebook.

Company-wide achievement type analytics are perfect for sharing with your whole team. Think of it like a football game where everyone is cheering for the same team, but in this case your business is the team. By getting everyone in on the fun and being able to visualize the data and progress you’re making, your employees will feel like important team members. If you really want to encourage staff to pay attention to these analytics, consider displaying them on a TV in your conference room or break room for people to check regularly.

4. Identify Struggling Employees

In addition to the ability to identify and acknowlege your top performers, applying analytics to your employee’s performance helps you find the struggling and unhappy workers as well. As we discussed in the introduction, happy employees are more productive employees so you are probably safe assuming that those who are struggling in their work are probably unhappy as well. If you notice that certain employees aren’t meeting their numbers consistently, it’s probably a good time to pull them aside and talk to them about how you can help them perform better. They might have some insights into your processes that you haven’t thought of before. And just think, identifying the unhappy employees (especially when you run a large organization) would have been so much more difficult without data.

You can approach this dashboard in the same way that you approached the dashboard example in #2. Being able to track leads, opportunities, etc for a sales team (or other important metrics for other teams) will help you see the top performing players as well as those who are near the bottom of the heap.

Regardless of what approach you take towards using data to encourage your employees, the bottom line is that involving employees in the down and dirty of your business will help them take ownership of their job and the company. Those who take ownership of their position are ultimately more motivated and productive employees. Who knows, if you continue that encouragment, you might just end up with a team of people who stay with you for years to come.

Ready to start using data dashboard to measure your employees performance and start motivating them? Check out our FREE trial and start building a employee motivation dashboard today!

The post How a Data Dashboard Can Serve as an Employee Motivation Tool appeared first on Cyfe.

• The Pro of managing an ecommerce business: it’s entirely measureable!
• The Con of managing an ecommerce business: it’s entirely measurable (and those metrics need to be tracked and interpreted). Ugh…

Ecommerce metrics, or KPI’s (key performance indicators), are legitimate game-changers provided you know which ones demand your focus. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s kick things off with this in mind:

You can’t manage what you can’t measure,

and you can’t improve what you can’t manage.

• Peter Drucker (paraphrased)

This axiom permeates throughout all aspects of digital marketing, but is especially poignant when it comes to ecommerce solutions that directly boost the bottom line.

Sales are the name of the game and if there’s a way to measure how your audience responds to your online store and how that might affect your revenue, then it’s worth using those metrics to your advantage.

The data is available; it’s only a matter of investing time into understanding what to measure and how to interpret those measurements that may stand between you and your online business’ next big shift to greatness.

How to Begin Tracking Ecommerce Metrics

Get a baseline. Start off by understanding where you are right now. See if you notice any trends or interesting data. If something surprises or confuses you (for better or worse) make a note of it. Diving into data won’t do very much if you don’t have a firm baseline from which to measure against. So, it’s helpful to get a quick point of reference and determine which data points interest you the most.

Stick with a consistent measurable time frame. While looking at actionable ecommerce data on a daily basis is a reasonable goal to work towards, to begin it’s more important to grasp the bigger sales trends at play. Days and even weeks can be volatile, so breaking measurements out into monthly data, or more specifically, groupings of weeks (because months often end at mid-week) will be most helpful.

Example: Collect and review data every Monday through Sunday and then evaluate the overall picture over a four-week span of time.

Define your goals. Who are any of us kidding? When it comes to running an ecommerce-based business, the top goal is likely to increase sales. We get it and we support it! However, in order to drive your bottom line, you may need to boost your website traffic and boost conversion rates and boost click-through rates…it goes on and on, but it’s helpful to start off by defining some (small) goals. Have an attainable target or targets in mind. Then, as you learn more, you can (and should) adjust and add.

Which Ecommerce Metrics Matter Most?

The answer you don’t want to hear is that it depends. But really, your professional business goals will dictate what matters most to you, your customers, and your bank account. That said, here’s a rundown of what are typically the most relevant ecommerce metrics to track and understand. Ready? Let’s dive into some data…

#1 Ecommerce Metric: Total Ecommerce Site Traffic

This is, after all, a numbers game. More website visitors equal more sales conversions (more on that later), so start by understanding the big picture. More specifically…

• How many people visit your website each month?
• Where are these folks coming from? Are they finding your website through digital marketing ads, social media networks, Google searches?
• How long are visitors staying on your site?
• What is their journey? Which pages are they visiting and in what order?
• What is your ecommerce site’s bounce rate? (Bounce rate measures the percentage of viewers who leave — or bounce — after viewing only one web page).

Having this ongoing snapshot view of your ecommerce site will help guide you to better decision-making when it comes to marketing, advertising, and design — ultimately getting a better understanding of your audience and how to best sell to them.

And speaking of your audience…

#2 Ecommerce Metric: Audience Analysis

It’s essential to know exactly who your audience is so you can understand how to best engage them and sell to them. Things to measure:

• Age, sex, location? Getting a grasp of audience demographics makes a tremendous difference from a sales perspective. Are these rural or city folks? Can their geographical location tell you anything about their annual income or how much they might be willing to spend on your services? Different messaging should be used to target specific audiences.

• Time of day? Is your audience more apt to shop in the wee early hours on Thursdays? Are they weekend afternoon shoppers? If you don’t know, you can’t target and make the most of these timely opportunities.

• Seasonality? Do you get more visitors during the holidays? Major sales events? Is yours a seasonal business? This info will inform your marketing strategy and let you know what’s working or flubbing, so know these answers cold.

• Device type? Are people viewing your site through mobile devices, laptops, phones, and what kinds? This is good to know so you can tweak your ecommerce site design to maximize your viewer’s user experience and most efficiently lead them to your call to action.

Here’s a sample web analytics dashboard from Cyfe that analyzes audience demographics at a glance. Number of visitors, geographic location, and more are featured in this custom dashboard.

#3 Ecommerce Metric: Conversion Rate

This is the big one. Because you’ve been so astute and already know your total ecommerce site traffic (see #1 Ecommerce Metric), you can figure out your total conversion rate by measuring how many of those site visitors make a purchase. Divide your number of sales by total visitors and voila! you have your conversion rate. Your sales conversion rate instantly measures your ecommerce success or shortcomings, so get on this metric fast.

EXPERT TIP: Once you become an ecommerce metric master, you can track conversion rates from all different sources to determine which sources of traffic are most profitable to your company.

Dive into sales that convert from visitors who came from each source of traffic and pit them against each other. Such as LinkedIn vs. Facebook vs. Reddit vs. email vs. organic search. All of these will help you determine your overall marketing strategy.

To start, focus on increasing your conversion month-over-month.

#4 Ecommerce Metric: Average Order Value (AOV)

Hopefully it’s a given that you should know how much revenue you’re bringing in on a regular basis. Assuming you have that key data, check out your AOV next. AOV tells you the average of how much your buyers are spending per order. It’s up to you to determine what’s spending a little vs. what’s spending a lot, but knowing your AOV will dictate your next steps.

Example: If you have a lot of ecommerce site visitors spending a little cash, you need a lot more visitors to earn more cash. Conversely, if you find that visitors are spending a great deal on one or two items, perhaps it’s time to rethink how to either focus your marketing strategy on those products or to sell related add-ons that will keep your AOV on an upward trajectory.

#5 Ecommerce Metric: Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Understanding your customer’s journey through your ecommerce site is perhaps most relevant at the final point of sale — the shopping cart. It is (unfortunately) common for shoppers to fill up their cart and hit the road before confirming a final purchase. It’s naturally in the best interest of online business owners to avoid this!

Some (kind of) good news: The average shopping cart abandonment rate for major corporations is a whopping 69%, so don’t be alarmed if you think yours is high. The key here again is the act of measuring data. Knowing your shopping cart abandonment rate is half the battle. If you know what it is, you can work at reducing it. How you reduce it is up to you. You might find that you need to adjust your messaging, reminders, or your targeted email marketing campaigns, if that’s your thing. But remember that you can’t do anything worthwhile, other than guess, without first analyzing the metrics.

Stop Guessing! Use Ecommerce Metrics.

There are infinite more ecommerce metrics to study up and learn, but these five will kick you off in the right direction before you’re ready to tackle more.

Know this: ecommerce metrics, perhaps more than any other digital marketing metrics, are directly linked to your bottom line. They are incredibly powerful insights into your audience that are immediately actionable and should be taken very seriously.

If you’re not measuring your ecommerce site metrics, you’re guessing. And sure, you’re smart and you can probably make some fairly intelligent guesses, but the data will undoubtedly guide you to eliminating costly errors. So, what are you waiting for? Get in there, get the data, and get the sales!

Not sure what metrics you need to be measuring for your ecommerce goals? Check out our FREE Beginner’s Guide to Choosing the Right Marketing KPIs for Your Business.

The post 5 eCommerce Metrics You Need to Grow Your Business appeared first on Cyfe.

Small businesses need to find the edge over the competition wherever possible. A major element in that concept is tracking the right business metrics. There are several key indicators that help you decide when your business is due for growth, whether you have a bottleneck in your path to success, or if there is a hole in your strategy. In this post, we will go over some of the most important financial metrics to keep an eye on.

1. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

This is key. Without breaking out your cost of goods sold over time, across different products, and through other difference-makers, you won’t understand where your profits come from. It is all very well and good to see big revenue numbers, but without taking into account your production costs, you aren’t really learning anything about the health and long-term viability of the business model. This is especially important for a young and growing business, because it is tempting to generate a lot of revenue with low prices to gain market share early on. However, if you can’t start generating an actual profit over your costs, you will eventually burn through your cash.
There are a few things you can learn from your cost of goods sold. First of all, you can see how your costs are changing. Even in isolation, this is useful to know. You can see if your production is getting more efficient and reducing your costs, for example, or if switching suppliers affected costs. That helps you make sure your costs aren’t creeping up or eating into more of your margin unexpectedly. This is especially important during expansion, because new products often cost the most to sell at launch, with costs coming down. If you expect costs to decrease over time, then you should see indicators of that in the cost of goods sold.
You also need to be able to break out the margins of each product. It is okay to have a loss leader that you take a thin loss on if that leads to more purchases of profitable items later on, but you can’t handle sustained losses. The last few years of the tech sector should be enough to show anyone how dangerous it is to build your business model around years of losses, especially when there is no concrete plan to swing into the black.
Cost of goods sold is one of the most crucial financial metrics both in aggregate and in fine detail, so keep a close eye on it. It could be the key to many things, from pricing and growth to R&D and support.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost

Next up we have another cost. Customer acquisition costs are all the costs associated with converting a lead into a customer, and they generally consist primarily of marketing and sales dollars. This is an area where it’s easy to overspend. If your CAC is too high, then you need to find a way to increase conversions or to spend less money and get the same results. Spend too much on sales and marketing and you will run into problems; the margin of revenue over cost of goods sold will get wiped out when you take into account CAC. Sales and marketing are both highly complex fields in today’s business world, so it isn’t easy to find the best and most efficient approaches for your needs, but spending some time on sharpening your strategy is key.
Most marketing (and much of the sales process, especially at big companies) today has at least some online component, and it might be completely online. Online marketing tactics such as email and social media tend to be cheap and high-volume, so they are attractive to small businesses. Some of the big costs come in, however, on larger tactics such as SEO and web design. It is increasingly common to outsource these to marketing companies. This is not necessarily a bad move. It’s rare for a small business to have the internal talent and time to spend on SEO-oriented web design so it makes sense to seek out those who do and partner with them. However, costs can potentially run high when working with outside vendors, and what makes matters more difficult is the necessity of paying for the work before the increased revenues from new sales come in. In addition, accounting can be a little tricky as well, if you don’t remember to include some of these costs in your total CAC.
As with cost of goods sold, CAC is useful if you can break it out by type of customer, the channel, the things the customers buy, and so on. That will help you see where your marketing is most effective, what kind of groups you are efficiently converting, and whether high-CAC customers go on to buy enough to justify the costs to acquire them. This last point is important. If you are trying to increase conversions among a particular group and are spending a lot on marketing, more conversions don’t mean more profits if those customers are buying low-margin items. When possible, increase the efficiency of your marketing by funneling potential customers to products with better margins.
CAC is also a key financial metric to keep you focused on retention. Visualize how much you need to spend to bring in a new customer and how much uncertainty there is associated with that process. For less money and less effort, you can keep existing customers and make them into repeat business. The saying in business is “the best customers are the ones you already have” and that holds true even today.

3. Cash Burn Rate

You’ve heard the phrase, “you have to spend money to make money.” Nowhere is this phrase more relevant than in business. If you want to expand and make a splash, you need to be willing to invest early on in the life of your business. However, that doesn’t mean you have to use up all your cash in the first six months, either. Half of all small businesses fail in the first year and one-third fail in the first two years. The main reason for this high failure rate is a lack of cash flow. Businesses simply run out of money to sustain. The founders fail to foresee how long it will take before their company starts to turn a profit, or underestimate the day-to-day costs of operating. To be safe, always go into a new business with the mentality that you might need to eat a year’s worth of costs before profit comes in. The cash burn rate is the right metric to monitor how much longer you can stay afloat.
While the first two metrics we discussed were specific types of cost, the cash burn rate is more overarching because it provides an all-inclusive look at sustainability. It’s easy to calculate how much longer you can maintain your current state and when you will need to start turning a profit.
The cash burn rate is also a good reality check for business owners. It’s easy to get excited in the early days of big spending and growth. Checking in with your burn rate helps you see just how unsustainable that is, keeping you grounded and in tune with long-term realism. That initial growth phase won’t last forever, and by looking at your monthly or annual pace for spending, you’ll see that your revenue will fall short of expenditures until you start to convert efficiently and build a loyal customer base. Cash burn rate doesn’t tell you where your money is going or whether it is being well spent, so you’ll need to connect the dots a little to decide whether you are making good use of your resources. It is most useful as a sort of ticking clock, a countdown of when you’ll be forced to seek exterior financing or shut down. The more you can reduce your burn rate while increasing revenue, the quicker you can swing into profitability.

All three of these metrics are costs. You want to focus on costs because they guide many decisions in all realms of business. These are also metrics that many owners underappreciate. They key in on helping you reach profitability and avoiding burnout. In the modern, heady market with startups and online platforms making entrepreneurship accessible, it’s more important than ever to stay calm and locked-in on the long-term sustainability goal. For every Facebook, there are a thousand new businesses that flame out and go unnoticed because they never developed a way to make a profit. By focusing on these three core metrics, you’ll see exactly where and how you can improve your efficiency. Consider this an introduction to the world of business intelligence. The right data can change your entire perspective and deliver powerful insight across each part of your business. That includes visualizations and graphs as well as raw data. Look into getting a good BI dashboard that can bring these and other metrics within easy reach.

Ready to start building out your BI dashboard and start measuring these important KPIs? Take Cyfe for a test drive! Build your first dashboard for free! No credit card. No obligation. Just insight!

The post 3 Financial Metrics Every Small Business Should Track appeared first on Cyfe.

All businesses are looking to increase sales, right? We’ve certainly never encountered a business who’s told us that they would like to decrease sales. Whether your busienss is suffering from a decrease in sales or just looking to kick it into higher gear, sales analytics metrics are the first step towards increasing your sales.

Sales analytics metrics exist to help you understand the effectiveness of your current sales process. Understanding your current process and the health of your sales pipeline will help you identify areas of opportunity or pieces that aren’t as effective as they could be and improve the overall success of your pipeline. Tracking these metrics historically will help you to analyze trends in your results with more clarity and you will even begin to start forecasting future trends and opportunities.

Let’s take a look at the seven sales analytics metrics every company should be monitoring and how they can help you understand the strength of your overall sales process and pipeline.

1. Number of Open Opportunities

One of the most important numbers to look at is the number of open opportunities each representative is working at a given time. By determining how many opportunities are created and available to your sales reps, you can get an idea of whether you are generating enough new opportunities.

Is this number low? That means you aren’t providing your sales representatives with enough opportunities for them to pursue. Given that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, a low number of open opportunities will lead to a low number of overall sales and lower revenue.

In this case you want to take a look at your MQL-to-SQL (link to content offer when live) ratio. If this percentage is decreasing over time that means you’re having a problem converting marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads. This might mean that your definition of a sales qualified lead is too strict or that your ideal customer is changing and the sales process needs to change in concert with that change. Take a look at the criteria you’ve put in place for converting a MQL to a SQL and determine whether it’s time to make a change in that criteria.

EXPERT TIP:

Another thing you can use this metric for is to evaluate the spread of opportunities amongst your different sales reps. Reps working too many open opportunities aren’t able to spend much time on each opportunity to qualify and close those people and will thus become ineffective salespeople. Making sure opportunities are divided adequately amongst your sales team (after taking experience level, time needed to service an opportunity and deal size under consideration) will help ensure that your salespeople have enough time to work with each prospect until they are ready to make a purchase.

2. Total Closed Opportunities

Just because you have a lot of open opportunities does not mean that you’re sales process is working correctly. That’s why you want to also consider the total number of closed opportunities (both closed – won and closed – lost opportunities).

Imagine, for example, that you have a sales rep that’s being provided with 10 open opportunities per day but only closing 10 of those per month. In that scenario you need to determine why your rep is closing so few of their open opportunities. It’s possible that they don’t understand how to properly close a deal or they’re just letting potential business fall through the cracks. No matter the reason, this is cause for concern and is something that you should address with that sales rep so that future opportunities aren’t left by the wayside.

3. Win Rate

Win rate will help you understand the success rate of your sales team and can be calculated using a simple equation:

(Closed Won Opportunities)/(Total Closed Opportunities) 

This metric will help you identify which, if any reps, are struggling to close deals. By identifying the sales reps that are struggling to win deals, you can work with those reps to determine where they are struggling and how you can help them win more deals. If conversion rates are low in the early stages, your team might be struggling with rapport building, qualification or even product knowledge and demos. By contrast, if conversions are low in the latter stages of the funnel, they might be struggling with managing objections, gaining commitment, or their negotiation or closing skills.

4. Deal Size

In the short term, knowing the average sales price of all closed – won deals will make it easier for you to identify opportunities that fall outside the normal deal size. Larger (3x or greater) opportunities tend to have smaller win rates and longer sales cycles and should be called out as such in the your system so it can be monitored adequately.

In the long-term, this metric will help you track when and by what margin you start beginning to win bigger deals. If you average deal size increases significantly, that might mean you’re attracting larger deals and your pipeline is changing. Larger deals also might cause your pipeline to change as deals of a larger cost tend to take longer on average to convert than those of a smaller cost.

EXPERT TIP:

If you notice an increase in smaller deals, it might be something you want to look into. It’s possible that your sales team is foregoing larger deals because smaller deals are easier to win. Or they might be giving too many discounts that are affecting your pipeline.

5. Sales Cycle Length

Your sales cycle is the average time it takes your team to win a deal. This metric should be measured starting from when the lead comes in and ending when the deal is closed. Sales cycle lengths depend on a lot of different factors including your industry, sales price, etc. As such, no one sales cycle length works for all industries or even all businesses in the same industry. Therefore, it’s most important here to measure this from a historical perspective so you can identify whether your sales cycle is increasing or decreasing in length.

This will also help you identify any place in the sales cycle where prospects get hung up or spend an unusual amount of time. This will inform you which skills you should coach your sales team on to decrease the amount of time a prospect lives in that stage of the sales cycle.

You can also use this metric to identify the likelihood that new prospects will become buyers. After all, there is a high correlation between the amount of time an opportunity spends in a stage and the likelihood of it becoming a won deal. Use historical data to identify deals that are less likely to close based on the amount of time they have remained in a particular stage of the pipeline.

6. Cost of Sales to Revenue Ratio

This metric reflects the overall efficiency of the sales division without having to look at numbers for individual sales reps. Total costs should include salaries, commissions and expenses for your sales team. Over time, evaluating the cost of sales to revenue ratio will help you understand the level of investment needed to reach a certain performance level. This will, in turn, help you estimate how much money you need to put into sales in order to reach certain revenue goals.

7. Specific Actions

While analyzing big picture metrics is incredibly important to understanding the overall performance of your team, it’s also crucial to evaluate performance based on measurable actions taken by the sales team. Identifying the most influential actions and setting KPIs based on those actions will keep your sales team on track and will help them understand what actions they should be spending their time doing.

Here are a few examples of action-based metrics you can measure for your sales team as a whole or even for individual reps:

• Number of outreach emails sent
• Number of first contact calls made
• Number of follow-up calls made
• Number of follow-up emails sent
• Number of meetings scheduled
• Number of demos given
• Number of proposals sent

There are tons of additional sales analytics metrics that a business can measure but starting with some of these high-level metrics will help you get a feel for your overall pipeline and determine whether your overall process is effective or needs to be revised in order to be more successful. Businesses are always looking to hit revenue numbers and manage their teams successfully. In order to do both of these, it’s important to start focusing on some of the most critical sales metrics. The seven metrics above should be a good starting point for understanding your overall pipeline and identifying any areas of opportunity within your overall sales cycle.

Tired of looking at data in 100 different places? Wish you could access all of your analytics in one business dashboard? We can help! Check out our FREE trial today and get ready to more easily view and analyze all of your business data.

The post 7 Sales Analytics Metrics Every Company Should Be Monitoring appeared first on Cyfe.

Business intelligence and business analytics both revolve around how a business can tap into available data to improve its decision-making. However, many people are unsure what separates the two terms, if anything. In this post, we’ll explain the difference between business intelligence and business analytics so you know what each of them is referring to and what that means for your own business. We will examine two different viewpoints. The first involves how business intelligence and business analytics describe different approaches to using data and gathering insight. The second focuses on how usage of the terms themselves has changed and what that means for their application.

Business Intelligence vs. Business Analytics: A Difference in Time 

One way to differentiate business intelligence and business analytics is that both use data, but business intelligence uses historical data to learn from past decisions while business analytics is forward-looking and attempts to predict what will happen in the future. For example, business intelligence might describe a company’s attempt to examine why a marketing campaign did not draw as much interested as expected. Business analytics would use marketing data to predict how consumers would respond to a different campaign in the future.

Both approaches are important, and one is not greater or lesser than the other. The two are complementary in that they provide different insights and draw upon different sources. Neither one can answer all of the questions and solve all the problems a business has. They also call for different statistical techniques: forecasting is a different form of statistics compared to drawing conclusions from past data.

The difference is, to a degree, academic. Any business needs to understand its past and be able to look into the future if it wants to succeed. But it is still worthwhile to separate them because they require different datasets, skills, and tools. That means different employees will be working on each and each may use different vendors to supply the necessary software. From a logistical perspective, then, BI and BA can be defined by the extent to which they need different resources. This can vary from company to company. In some organizations there might in fact be considerable overlap, while in others the gap might be large. This comes down to the IT culture of each company and how it prefers to collect and process its data.

The insights drawn from each approach play into the company’s overall strategy. Business intelligence helps to show what works and what doesn’t work in retrospect. That’s critical for honing in on strengths and shoring up weaknesses. It’s difficult for a business to thrive when it cannot understand what attributes of its product are the most and least attractive. BI also guides how well the company met its goals. For example, products and campaigns typically have intended audiences that are the targets of marketing and design. Proper use of BI allows the company to determine if it succeeded in reaching that audience. Business analytics then carries the insights into the future. The company can attempt to model a particular change or new campaign to see how well it will do based on projections.

While the goals and tools in each approach differ, both rely on gathering as much data with as high quality as possible. Not having enough data means that you cannot rely on the conclusions you draw because the sample size is too small. Low sample sizes just don’t provide enough evidence to support insight. Likewise, if the data is hard to access, stored in a difficult format, or isn’t detailed enough, then it will be difficult to arrive at useful conclusions no matter what approach you are taking. The company needs to make an active effort to gather and clean data so that both processes can proceed smoothly. To that end, the exact border where business intelligence ends and business analytics begins perhaps matters less than a company’s data culture. Data is a resource and the business needs to be prepared to make full use of it in whatever capacity it can. That takes effort and investment of staff time and infrastructure. Moreover, as data and analysis in general becomes increasingly accessible thanks to cloud computing and inexpensive storage, the boundary will continue to blur. The end result is that it boils down to data and exploiting that data for all the information and guidance it can yield, no matter what the name of the process is.

A Difference in Terms

That leads us into another viewpoint on the difference between business intelligence and business analytics, which is that there is no real meaningful difference. According to this view, making use of data and information has been a part of business for many decades. The only thing that has changed is the terms we use to describe that process. The evolution comes as a result of vendors and other stakeholders who want to distinguish their new offerings from what came before. They introduce progressively newer ways to describe their products in order to convey how the most recent edition adds more value than previous generations. As a result, business analytics has simply begun to replace business intelligence as the way to discuss business-data products and services.

There is some evidence for this effect. If you use the Google Trends tool to compare “business intelligence” with “business analytics” you will immediately observe that usage of BI has been declining steadily while the usage of BA has been increasing over the last several years. That might indicate that the two are not really complements, but that industry use has shifted from one term to another. In other words, BA is just the newer version of BI, but they both refer to the same thing: using data to solve problems.

That is not to say that the distinction is without any meaning at all. It does matter that the business world wants to change how it describes data, because there is a real shift occurring now. Several recent advances have made it possible for more and more businesses to collect, store, and analyze data at a scale that was previously too expensive to contemplate. At the same time, giants like Google have demonstrated that it is entirely possible to let data lead product development and improvement. Data can lead you toward growth even before you have a completely settled business plan. Simply coming up with a way to collect data and then figuring out how to monetize it later has become a common theme in many startups. While that approach has its limitations, it certainly demonstrates just how powerful it is to come up with a unique way to gather or organize data.

The newest data products and services can handle greater sizes and scales of datasets than ever before and can do so with simpler interfaces and more powerful tools. That means less staff time and less training is necessary to tap into data’s power. A clean GUI and simple, approachable analytical tools means you do not need to have a fully-trained data scientist on staff to take advantage of the data you have. On top of that, the emphasis on cloud readiness means that the company does not need to own its own data architecture. That is a significant improvement because data storage and administration in-house can be expensive and time consuming. Cloud solutions are increasingly cheap, secure, and remotely accessible. The new world of business analytics is not just about coming up with new techniques or applications, but the open access to those tools.

Another major new trend is the ability to integrate different data projects together. For example, while it may be useful for marketing, sales, and customer support to all collect data, there are even more gains to be had by combining all of that data together into a single birds-eye view of the customer encounter. That concept is known as customer relationship management, or CRM, and it’s transforming how businesses approach their operations. CRM software draws data from every department and combines it for new insight that would not have been visible from one alone. CRM as an analytical toolkit is becoming cheaper and easier to use just like other forms of analytics.

All of this comes down to saying that the change from using the term “business intelligence” to “business analytics” denotes an important change in the relationship between business managers and data. Now, managers and owners need to be more conversant with what data can do and how they need to proactively harvest data to generate future returns. The importance of data hasn’t changed, but its accessibility has.

The bottom line is that the question of business intelligence vs. business analytics is secondary to the greater point: now is the time to commit to establishing standards and a method for using data. There are more tools and solutions available than ever before. Whether it comes from social media interaction, website and app interaction, purchasing and financing, email marketing, support, or any other source, it is hard to justify not taking advantage of the available data to guide how you create and market your product.

There are tons of different business intelligence and analytics metrics you can track. It can get a little overwhelming! Setting key performance indicators can help you spend your time analyzing only the most important metrics for your business. Not sure where to start?

The post What is the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics? appeared first on Cyfe.