O MANNY's

You know what I’ve started to realize more and more about today’s and future business environment . . . there's a growing need to make better decisions with limited resources. 

And the best tools so far that can help is not, “Rock, Paper, or Scissors” but taking actions, collecting data which gets analyzed to gain insights to make better outcome.

This material in this post is meant for startups, SMB (small medium business), Enterprise, Marketers, Founders, Decision Makers that are looking to incorporate Marketing Analytics , Business Analytics, Digital Analytics and Other Analytics to achieve better results with better tools during covid-19 and post-coronavirus.

One thing I and the BJ Mannyst team know for sure is covid-19 has forced many like you to adopt some form of analytic. And I know some of you are even hesitant to adopt advance analytics services and platform because you are faced with many other top priorities & challenges. Hopefully this content will inform and educate you further during these uncertain times.

HOW BUSINESS ANALYTICS CAN HELP YOU NOW & POST COVID-19?

4 KEY AREAS OF BUSINESS ANALYTICS

Think of it like the process of a General Physician.

• Descriptive Analytics: which involves using existing data / situations to describe the current state of things. Just like when your doctor listen to your heart beat and checks your medical history.
• Diagnostic Analytics: which digs deeper into what's causing symptoms, basically an attempt to understand why something has happened. Your doctor wants to know effect and cause.
  
• Predictive Analytics: which aims to predict future outcome based on what’s known so far. Like when your Doctor tells you to lose some weight because it may extend your life.
• Prescriptive Analytics, which offers recommendations for addressing a problem like losing weight. The Doctor tells you to exercise more and cut back on unhealthy diet.

Taking the four key areas above into consideration you should be able to tell what I will say next. Doing Business Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Digital Analytics and other Analytics is the cheapest way to make sure your business stays healthy for today and tomorrow. 

It’s way cheaper than major business surgery like having to layoff half your workforce. 

So what are examples of benefits:

If you are marketing your service and products at this moment, and you just want to improve your outcomes. . .then continue to read. For example, I have observed a e-commerce startup sell a product that was a big hit initially but eventually got frustrated because they could not scale till the founders started analyzing their operation. They realized the market was too small. It was not going to become a huge market.  

It could be host of many reasons why even your business is doing poorly today. The fact is without analytics you'd simply be wasting resources.

• Analytics helps you make the adjustment before it’s too late
• Analytics takes out the guess work in decision making
• Analytics empowers the different departments or business functions
• Analytics helps in improving sales strategy (well, you still have to sell)
  
• Analytics helps you find out who is the most efficient sales person or manager
• Analytics helps improve personnel succession planning
• Analytics helps improve offers
• Analytics helps improve strategy and tactics
• Better expansion timing
• Better fiscal discipline
• Better recruiting
• Analytics helps compliment other decision making approaches (In addition to gut feeling)
  
• Analytics can help you eat the competition (eat or beat, its up to you) 
• Analytics helps gain insights 
• Analytics helps you know who are your most valuable customers
• Analytics helps you compare yourself to competitors
• Analytics helps you discover best profitable opportunities
• Analytics helps forecast customer behavior
• Analytics helps improve the customer journey
• Analytics helps you turn your organization from average to great

HOW TO BEGIN BUSINESS ANALYTICS, MARKETING ANALYTICS, AND DIGITAL ANALYTICS?

The long explanation is: First of all, it will involve the 4 areas mentioned above, clear goals, capturing of data, cleaning of data, preparing processes, analytic software, maybe Excel, computing power, privacy & security guidelines, storage, analysis expertise, statistical understanding, organizational skills, some math, attention to detail, reporting to different stakeholders, trained person (either yourself, hired, or outsourced), model training, public relations training just in case, maybe mechanical sensors, maybe a cloud platform, AI, Machine Learning, Predictive, Python, R, Anaconda, Project Management, Flowcharts, etc
 

The simple explanation is: Start small and gradual. The tangible and intangible components involve are a lot. So begin with baby steps. You can learn and watch others, try the beginner tools like Excel or Google Sheets, or simply outsource the easy-moderate-advance analytical aspects.


See once you get started with analytics,  your business may begin to improve overall operation because the Speed, Accuracy, Computing Power, A.I, and the analytical environment will make you wonder why you never had this sooner. 

I and others once analyzed a 4 Million rows by 12 columns  data (BIG DATA) of a giant alcohol retailer located in Midwestern  US in few days and that’s only possible today because of the powerful tools. Memory (RAM) used due to processing the data was in high gigabytes, data size was gigabytes, so you have to have access to technology that allows you perform analysis fast.

With that said, startups and small businesses do face a number of challenges with business / marketing / digital or other analytics. 

• Untrustworthy analysis
• Expense to setup including man power
• Finding the right software, hardware, and vendor
• So many options from: Cloud based, On-premise, Desktop, Virtual Machine
• Learning curve (Yeah for some analytical process it does involve some understanding of statistics, math, software education, IT, programming, etc)
• Involves patient (It sometime takes time to  get valuable insights)
  
• Resistance to change
• Culture is not data driven or what I call "data science strong"
  
• Lots of Data, Analysis Paralyses, Overload builds up
  
• Centralizing data
• Poor visualization best practices
  
• Measuring the wrong indicators or variables
  
• Developing wrong models
• What I call, Half-full or Half-empty paralyses. Decision is based on the wrong perception
• Data issues: Volume, Velocity and Variety
• Storage format: HDD to SSD to Encrypted Storage to capacity limits
• Hacking or theft
• Ransomware
  
• Blackbox Model (when the analysis model or algorithm is not transparent)
• If future file standards (like csv) change or operating systems change or hardware change
  
• Ethics
• Biases
• Avoiding becoming a creepy big brother business
  

HOW DO YOU PICK THE RIGHT TOOLS?

Picking the right tools, infrastructure for your business analytics, marketing analytics, digital analytics or other will be up to you and your team or maybe a consultant. At the end of the day this is not something to be taking lightly. It’s as significant has picking who you will marry. Because if you get it wrong that time and money is gone. 

You however need analytical tools that have most of the following:  

• Appealing and modern easy to use interface and terminology (Either your application or hardware)
  
• Ability to create unlimited dashboards and visualization
• Can read and save to most common data formats and access other remote sources like APIs
• Doesn't lock you into their proprietary attributes
• Can modify most data file types
  
• Has option for collaboration, sharing, presentation, social, etc
  
• Security and access control
  
• Powerful yet easy to use
• Office program integration
• Ease of integration
• Pricing and license model makes sense
  
• Skills availability in the marketplace (you will need enough talents that are trained in the tools)
• Options for add-on, plugins and extensions
• The application or hardware itself doesn’t use too much computing resources
• Better have good hardware: fast processor, huge storage, memory, quality display, graphic cards, etc
• Online help
• Video tutorials
• Contextual aids
• User communities
• Good customer service

WHAT MYSELF & THE BJ MANNYST TEAM CAN PROVIDE YOUR GROWING SERVICE BUSINESS?

When it comes to business or marketing analytics for your startup or Small Medium Business you are better off working with people who can see and understand the whole picture. We go out of our way to make sure the services we provide are best for your business and for the moment. Which means if you need something quick & basic we can do that. If you need something that takes some time and has a higher quality we can help your organization achieve that. 

I hope this content is helpful to your startup or Small Medium Business in understanding the need for analytics in uncertain times. Gain better insights with Business Analytics. Gain better insight with Marketing Analytics. Survive and succeed with Analytics.

• Know your customers
• Identify opportunities and threats
• Address business needs
• Innovate better with relevant data
• Acquire competitive advantage
• Improve Services

***Depending on the case, business, industry. We currently perform moderate level business and marketing analytics. Which means  A.I. expertise coming.
***Contact Jenn, jenn[at]bjmannyst.com / jenn@foundersunder40.com or visit BJ Mannyst analytics service detail page. Cheers!!