Navigating small and medium sized businesses is extra tricky these days. The speed of technology and economic changes means that there is a constant need to adapt and dynamically solve new problems. What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work today and might even be a disaster tomorrow.
Key challenges faced by professional services firms across domains like Architecture, Engineering, Healthcare, Sales and Marketing, Construction etc include –
- Finding the right staff and ensuring that they are productively engaged.
- Providing a great customer experience that distinguishes your value proposition. This requires a deep understanding of the customer’s headaches, obstacles, aspirations and desires.
- Figuring out how to retain and grow existing customers while at the same time figuring out how to cost effectively reach new customers.
- Pricing right and driving a perception of value rather than compete solely on price, which always ends up to be a race to the bottom.
In order to address these challenges effectively, business leaders require a steady flow of insightful information that they can act upon.
Thanks to the technology revolution, small businesses can today afford the capability for capturing data across all areas of business engagement . But data alone amounts to very little, unless insightful information is generated out of it.
Here are 3 steps for creating useful dashboards quickly and cost effectively.
- Identify your data spread across departments like accounting, project management and multiple other disparate sources, in different formats.
- Examine the metrics that will give you the best indicators of how your business is performing. Establish the best visualization options for these indicators.
- Cost effectiveness depends on how much of existing technology you can leverage to create these indicators on a real time basis. Microsoft as well as Google have put out a suite of cloud based solutions including Business Intelligence tools that you can utilize and save time as well as cost.
If you feel that you need a little bit more than the above pointers to get started, you may request a FREE 30 minute consultation that will be focused on evaluating your current set up and requirements to propose an optimal approach that is tailored for your business.
