1. Ask the right questions to achieve your business objective:Begin with the end in mind when asking questions, gain clarity and focus on what you need to know to achieve your objectives. If our goal is to increase our product sales to achieve a financial return of 80% say, To gain clarity we need to ask ourselves the typical 5 questions: Who?, What?, Where, How? Why. For example, who is buying our products, what products are they buying from us, where are they buying (which geography)? How are they buying our products (which channels are they using)? Why did they buy our products?Brainstorm with “what if” scenarios. Understand what the best case could be in terms of product sales, what could be the most likely case and what could be the worst case.

   Companies across industries are trying to understand and connect to the consumer at a more personalized level.There has been a strong shift from the business-to-business (B2B) model to the business-to-consumer (B2C) model.

2. Track the Metrics crucial for your organisation – Use industry KPIs

A good metric/KPI is:

• A number that drives change you are looking for
• A good metric is comparative
• A good metric is understandable
• A good metric is a ratio or rate
• Quantitative
• Actionable
• Leading Metrics
• Causal Metric

Below are some examples of good KPIs:

1. Sales Growth 
2. Leads 
3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 
4. Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA) 
5. Website Traffic to Website Lead Ratio

 

3.Count People and number of unique Visitors instead of:

• Number of Hits
• Number of Page Views
• Number of Visits.
• Number of Downloads

 

4. Ensure that your Dynamic System is Data Driven:

To develop a Dynamic Data System, you need the right ‘People’, Processes’ and ‘Technology’.

The key people for a dynamic system is firstly, a Domain Knowledge person – understand the business and data available for answering the business questions,

Secondly, you need a Statistician who understands the statistical techniques that need to be applied to the data to discover insights and patterns that help to solve the business problems. The statistician is also able to provide data visualisation fast using drag and drop type tools for visualisation (Tableau, QlikView, SAS or R) to help the business user to make valuable decisions.

The third person you need is an Information Technology Specialist who ensures that the data definitions are consistent and that all the data is in one place and easy to retrieve for analysis in real-time thereby providing and effective enterprise dynamic system.

For Processes, we need to ensure that we have the right processes in place and that they are continuously improved, which means, we need to track process time and ensure that they are reasonable or even aim to shorten process times.We need to track customer complaints to better understand which processes require improvements and remove the processes that are not necessary.

5. To get the Dynamic System Right – Ask Lots of Questions

Starting with a clear objective is essential and then we still need to ask lots of questions once we have identified the objective. Question such as,  ‘What do you want to Achieve?’, ‘New Customers?’ or ‘Increased Customer Loyalty’ or ‘Increased Revenue?’. Then for example, how will you get the increased revenue? Will you run a promotion? How much increased sales do you expect from the promotion? Which customers are likely to buy from that promotion? When will these customers buy? How will they buy and which stores will they buy from? All these questions can be answered using statistical modelling and classification techniques that can be linked from one to another and in real-time the promotional offer is made to the right customer at the right time with the right product.