Effective Business Intelligence And Reaching Goals

Fortunately, and much to the dismay of many of those companies, companies like Qlikview have come along and allowed me and my peers to provide some really cool stuff to the middle market.

Tactical Business Metrics

I just made that term up. I throw anything that supports measurements to things like the sales process tactical. Just because someone names a methodology Strategic Selling doesn't make it strategic. Keep in mind that the sales organization derives it's initiatives from a corporate vision. Let's hope it's customer centric!

I'm really turned off by dashboards that look like a 1960's sports car. Or where there are so many Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) that you start wondering whether your just looking at raw data. Come on. Effective Business intelligence tools are supposed to be supplying information, not data. To me, that means I want to look at something and have it tell me everything's OK, or there's something wrong. I don't want to have to think about it. Do you?

I remember the first Executive Information System (EIS) I saw back in my banking days. It was so darned simple it was nearly perfect. There were three rectangles on the screen with labels. If the labels were green, the CEO could go back to his golf game. If they were yellow, he could click to get more information. If they were red, I assume people got fired. Of course, you have to trust that the color changes with some well defined risk guidelines, but you get the picture. To me, that was effective business intelligence in it's purest form.

Strategic Business Metrics

I made this one up too. Since this site is all about Customer Relationship Management (CRM), I want to emphasize here that as you put your business case together for CRM, one of the things you should be doing is identifying what is going to improve. So, if you're going to do that, you need a way to measure it. You could be trying to...

1. Incrementally increase revenue - your customer focused realignment could lead to the attraction of new customers at an increased rate. Referrals are great that way. If this is part of your plan, then plan to measure this increase relative to the implementation of your strategy.
   
2. Reduce costs - when you reduce the friction in the movement parts of your business by realigning information flows to focus on your customers, costs savings are going to occur, especially when you introduce CRM technology to support these process. Your plan should identify these reductions and how you plan to take advantage of them. Measurement of those goals is key to evaluating your success.
   
3. Improve profitability - whether by becoming more efficient, identifying a more profitable product and service mix, or by extending the average customer lifecycle, you should know what to expect in advance and measure it against your goals. Effective business intelligence tools are a great help, but a spreadsheet could do it too.
   
   
4. Retrieve lost opportunity costs - what have you been doing all these years? Losing customers you should have kept. Losing high quality employees that refused to put up with "that's the way we've always done it".  Turnover costs you money because it's always more expensive to acquire than it is to keep.

Effective business Intelligence tools can help you measure the goals you've set. They are a horrible waste of money if you don't set goals for your business.  The KPI's that come with most of these are focused on periodic accounting benchmarks and have little or no relationship to measuring CRM metrics. But if looking at pretty dials and sparklines makes your business more profitable...I'm happy for you. Don't call me.

Effective CRM Consulting from Effective Business Intelligence

Link to Effective CRM Consulting