Go By Your Gut But Validate With Facts And Figures

"Trust, but verify"

This is a quote from Horatio Caine (played by David Caruso) in the popular CBS series CSI Miami. It was also the signature phrase of President Ronald Reagan when discussing relations with the Soviet Union. As SMB owners, many of you tend to rely on gut feelings to make some important decisions. A less charitable way of looking at it is that you are making those decisions based on emotional feelings such as ego, insecurity, fear and greed. Some of those decisions can make or break a small business such as yours. It is prudent to challenge those decisions by collecting more data and doing objective analysis.

Decisions, decisions

Let us take an example. If you need to make decisions about where and how to spend your scarce advertising dollars, you know it is a huge gamble. However, especially if you are doing business online, you are already collecting a ton of data - the number of visitors to your site, the number that converted to leads and the number that actually bought something and so on. In addition, you also have access to demographic and other data - income, age, geographical data - freely downloadable from the government web sites. You need to be able to analyze your data, cross referencing it with the demographic data, to get actionable insight into who is your target market and where it makes most sense to put those bets. In short you need -- drum roll please -- business intelligence!