How To Gain A Competitive Advantage With Big Data
Today’s post is a guest post from Dorian Travers, Marketing Analyst. He discusses ways to get competitive advantage using meaningful data. I thank him for his contribution.
How To Gain A Competitive Advantage With Big Data
The chief objective for both small and large companies is growth. Business growth creates more jobs, more revenue, and keeps the corporation healthy and self-sustaining. The process to achieving growth year over year can be somewhat of a conundrum though. Some industries have complex data streams that pour in among unrelated departments but the marriage of each piece of data can be crucial in the creation of a feasible growth trajectory. Getting a handle on all your data can help you to interpret sales patterns, customer behavior, product lifecycle, and more. Once you have a better understanding of your data you can apply the appropriate b2b pricing strategy to create steady growth.
Discovering Pearls
Service and parts organizations may have transactions with thousands of vendors and customers in a given month. These transactions produce data that can be buried within the organization’s infrastructure, and as the company moves forward each day it may be difficult to stop and organize the data in a meaningful way. There are big data solutions that are available to help companies unlock these pearls so proper analysis and planning for future growth can occur. Finding an application that marries data housed within departments like accounting and operations can improve sales and create more revenue.
What Data Is Meaningful?
For service companies there is usually lots of data available for analysis. It can be housed within the same department or completely separate from one department to the next. The data that is most meaningful displays how sales prices were arrived at and how the sales and marketing teams achieved those sales.
- Operations Management data. Data from operations management teams may provide insight regarding products—how much it costs to purchase raw materials, the volume at which raw materials are consumed, the shelf life of all raw materials and finished goods.
- Sales and Marketing data. The sales and marketing team may track sales patterns and the buying behavior of its customers. Access to that data can provide the company with valuable information to create a stronger sales strategy and product price optimization. Sales and marketing personnel can also provide insight about the customers they sell products and services to.
- Accounting and Finance data. The accounting and finance departments use data to invoice customers and collect revenue. In order to do so, however, they also need the date a sale was closed, the price of the goods or services being sold, the quantity sold, and any rebate or discounts being offered.
Making Meaning from the Data
Data mining provides corporations with a multitude of insights that may be otherwise buried, inaccessible, and meaningless. Marrying information that can be shared within multiple departments allows for the corporation to increase its ability to reach more customers and potential for more sales. As sales and revenue increases the business can grow, create more jobs, and stays self-sustaining and solvent. Large corporations in particular, ones that have multiple departments working on related tasks and without the ability to share data in meaningful ways, can gain a competitive advantage with big data interpretation.
For more information, you can visit pros.com
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