Once your business has some customers and makes sales on a regular basis, you will likely find yourself at least a little obsessed with numbers. For many business owners, you’re concerned with things like your profit margin or making payroll.
Of course, numbers and data can do a lot more than that for you. You can use business data analysis for things like market research or informing strategic management decisions.
What if you’re not feeling confident about your business data analysis skills or process? Keep reading for a quick breakdown on how to conduct data analysis for business research.
Determine Goals
Before you do anything with a single piece of data, you need a clear picture of your goals for a given piece of business research. Knowing your goals helps structure the research and filter through the data.
After all, the things that interest your marketing department will prove very different from the things your logistics people care about. Just as importantly, you will see an exceedingly small amount of crossover between the data they use in their research and analysis.
Broad questions like, how do we sell more, will generate vague answers. Specific questions like, which marketing channels return the most leads overall, will return more specific answers.
Sort and Clean Your Data
Unless you’re looking at industry trends, odds are good that most or all of your data is in-house data. You must sort the data you want in, and filter out the data you don’t need. The good news is that you can usually count on your departments or the software you use to help you figure out what is what.
Once you sort, you must excise bad or unclear data. Then, you need it all in a format you can use. This may prove tricky with things like surveys that allow written answers.
Analysis
While you can manually analyze the data, you’ll likely end up using tools like spreadsheets, business intelligence apps, or predictive analysis tools. These tools do the heavy lifting in terms of crunching the numbers.
Once you get your results, you must assess them against the stated goal. Did the results give you an actionable insight? If not, you may need more data, better-refined data, or a more specific question.
If you feel really out of your depth with data analysis, you can always use a third-party analysis business, such as Peter Dodge Hanover Research.
Business Data Analysis and You
Business data analysis is part of the landscape when you open a business. You can’t ignore the data without jeopardizing the long-term health of your business. Just as importantly, all the data you collect from and about your customers and your own processes can help you create new business.
If possible, looks for ways you can formalize the process. Even if it’s just setting up a procedure for naming and formatting data files, it’ll make your life easier.
Looking for more business management tips? Check out our Business section for more posts.
