How to Get the Data You Need

Episode #5 of the course How to create a data-driven culture by Jon Leighton

 

Now that you’ve set your business objectives and chosen your KPIs, it’s time to start pulling it all together. So how do you get the data you need?

There are many tools out there that you can use to create a data-driven culture. Import.io has a great list of some tools that are great for big data, which we highly recommend you check out.

However, a lot of these are typically built for bigger businesses, often at an enterprise level. Your business also might not have “big data”—you’ve just got scattered data, so you don’t always need these complex and sometimes costly solutions.

If this is the case for you, here’s a few of our suggestions:

1. Use What You’ve Got

You’ll already have tools and platforms in place that will be collating data, such as the platform you use to run you store (like Magento or Shopify), an analytics tool such as Google Analytics, and social media tools such as Twitter or Facebook.

All of these will already be providing data for you; you just need to identify which ones hold the KPIs you wish to track.

Your data isn’t all held in these cloud tools either.

Get your customer service team to share insights from their conversations with users. Share what you learn with your web and marketing team and help them deal with any issues they weren’t aware of, which will help you to improve your KPIs.

2. Good Old Spreadsheet

Sometimes you just can’t go wrong with a good old Excel spreadsheet. If you’re not sure about giving all of your team access to every service you use, then create a document that everyone has access to that each department can contribute to and update.

Save time manually updating it by using a tool such as Zapier with Google Sheets to automatically pull in KPIs and update the spreadsheet at regular intervals.

3. Business Dashboard

You probably saw this coming, but using a business dashboard can be another simple way to create transparency and build a data-driven culture. Simply connect all your services and invite your team to sign up and they can view the data whenever and wherever they want.

There are no doubt many other ways to get access to the data that matters, but these are three of the simplest. Depending on your business, creating a simple Google sheet is all you need to spark that data-driven culture.

In the next lesson, we’ll look at how we can make sure that the team is on board with your new line of thinking.

Best,
Jon

 

Recommended book

Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset by Thomas C. Redman

 

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