Staying relevant is the ultimate strategy that works during economic tough times. Following data-driven metrics is the right way to stay relevant at all times.
Understanding data, getting insights from it, and implementing the insights — all possible when you have a robust data management strategy in place. It lets your company thrive during economic uncertainties. Besides, you must focus on growth drivers to achieve your business success.
Let's talk about everything here.
Growth Drivers to Stay Focused on Amid Economic Slowdown
Ignoring growth drivers during tough economic times is dangerous. While focusing on them, companies can solve maximum problems. If increasing the operational effectiveness of your business is your priority, you must not miss out on them.
Achieve Steady Cash Flow
Stabilizing the cash flow operation should be your first aim when you have all the data indicating an economic slowdown. Limiting your expenses or outflow is the first option you need to apply immediately when you feel that.
Adopting a data-driven solution for financial decisions can also help stabilize cash flow operations.
Raise Your Productivity Level
Almost all business analysts agree that 80% of the typical growth of a company comes from core operations. This rule applies everywhere, from the high-momentum industry to small businesses. When you focus on the core tasks, the possibilities of revenue generation will increase.
Hence, you need to focus more on increasing the productivity level of your internal members. If possible, you can choose delegation or outsourcing to get rid of non-core tasks.
Manage Internal Costs
Increasing internal costs can kill your operational capacity if you're unable to control it over time. Creation of a strong roadmap helps you control your internal costs. Before that, you need to identify the critical areas where you need to focus in order to minimize your internal costs.
Keeping all the data in front before making any decision regarding cost savings.
Tracking data from all over the operation is the first step, and in the next step, you need to find out the bleeding areas. Believe in data metrics to check the areas where you made the highest costs, which could be avoided. Data-driven decisions always help organizations stay on budget, stop overpayments, and optimize financial resources.
How Data Management Can Help During a Slowdown
Data management forms the base of effective administration. A strong company always focuses on adopting the latest data management practices. It is the strength that provides support to organizations during tough economic times. Let's check how it helps.
Creation of a central data repository
The first and foremost thing that data-driven organizations do is implement the latest data management practices. It pushes organizations to create and maintain a central data repository for their operations. This is tremendously helpful for the internal team to access all the data.
A central data repository is mandatory for CRM and ERP data management. Otherwise, vital data points will end up being stored in multiple locations.
For example, your sales executive just closed a deal and recorded the customer information in her sales record. Due to a lack of a central sales record database, your sales supervisor may put the same information in his record book. By the end, when both of them enter the data in your company's customer data, without a cross-check or reconciliation, one customer record can be entered multiple times. It will create chaos in the CRM database and create a mess there.
Rather, if a central CRM repository is placed there, it can reduce the error rate by 100%. Plus, it will reduce the time to enter the record by 50% also because it needs only one person to do the data entry work.
During the downtime, saving costs from error correction can help. Some errors are expensive to recover or sometimes irreversible, especially in marketing. Hence, the practice of data management can help you save money and bring flow to your operations.
Establishing data governance
Most of the companies (especially those in the tech field) don't survive during hard times due to a lack of data governance. Having systematic data governance principles in place is an extreme requirement here. To survive during challenging economic times, establishing strong data governance principles is vital. These principles must include;
- Data Security
- Data Usage
- Data Compliance
- Data stewardship
- Data management
Implementing data governance principles sharply at the organizational level can sometimes be tough. However, data experts can help there to successfully implement data governance measures.
Enhancement of data quality
Taking action quickly is possible when the data metrics are there. Maintaining quality data is important as it determines the outcomes. If quality data goes into the decision-making process, the outcomes will be the best. There is no doubt about it.
Following up on data quality parameters can help maintain the quality of the data intact.
- Data stored in your database must be accurate.
- All fields in your database must be filled with the right kind of data.
- Maintain a uniform data format for all your datasets
- Validate each record before entering it into your database
Data quality is everything. From your marketing to finance, you must maintain improved & proactive data quality across all your operational areas.
At the end, not only for the survival of the economic slowdown but also to achieve growth amid the tough times must be the aim here. Maintaining poor data itself is a burning symptom, and companies pay the invisible costs for this. You should not tolerate bad or low-quality data entering your database, especially during tough times.
To overcome all challenges, you need to stay updated and make rational data-backed decisions.
