Being a small company in a midmarket world imposes challenges enterprise-grade users will probably never experience, such as the shortage of vital resources for delivering impeccable products. For the good or the bad, users will always demand more than what they know you’re capable to offer, or simply go away never to return. Now that we’ve all reached the point of operating in a transformed business environment, we can’t help wondering if there is something more business analytics can do for our prosperity.
The truth is that some analytic trends in recent years did the impossible to mess up results accountability for moderate operators, and neglected a number of specific, low scale metrics midmarketers needed to ensure a competitive position. Luckily, the story of 2017 is one of small biz analytics redemption which may enable all of us to use advanced SaaS marketing strategies, and make smarter business decisions. Let’s see how:
At the dawn of what small marketers like to call ‘business intelligence revolution’, analytic programs adopted cloud deployment whose affordable price and minimal maintenance costs made them accessible even for the smallest companies and startups. The agility requirements were met, and the innovative feeds removed most of the pervasive obstacles for small companies to make enterprise-grade decisions. However, this was not enough for them to govern data across diverse sources, and led nowhere close to the desired extraction of the data’s business value.
Is 2017 going to change that? Our experts were notably positive about it.
The challenge: small commerce businesses are facing one of the most serious SaaS challenges, namely measuring customer retention in a world full of different memberships, subscriptions, and advanced interactions. At the same time, self-service accounts management is maturing, and attaching a question mark on the business’s authoring capabilities – in order to retain customers, businesses have to rely exclusively on graphics designed by occasional customers.
The solution: in 2017, business intelligence systems will measure churn rates based on self-stated turnover rates, and require users to reevaluate the quality of your service in order for you to make it more competitive. This approach is expected to simplify the number of churns against number of retained customers measurement process, and to provide seasonal results in order to detect the effect of churn rates per day, week, month, or period.
The challenge: Measuring corporate productivity is not that difficult, but the common mistake small business make is to use a different approach to measure the productivity of separate branches. At the same time, every business wishes to transfer positive productivity rates from one branch to another, and lack a program with joined CRM and ERP capabilities for a smooth spillover effect. Consequently, they lose both money and time.
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