What Is Business Intelligence and Why Is It Important?

The current digital age has transformed the way that things work across the board. But there is perhaps nowhere that it has made more of a difference than in the world of business. We now have tools that allow us to know more about our customers and business than ever before.

Of course, that’s if you know where to find them and what to do with what you discover. The data is out there, as are the tools needed to access it, you just have to learn how to take advantage. This is why business intelligence is the key to an effective modern business strategy.

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?

Business intelligence is the strategies and technologies used by companies to analyze data and business information. In more simple terms, it allows businesses to learn about any process or trend affecting performance, why things are happening, and what is likely to occur in the future.

A key factor in business intelligence is technology and being able to create business intelligence dashboards. The right business intelligence (BI) solutions will reveal more actionable data, provide clear insights, and facilitate strategic decision making.

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*Example of a Business Intelligence Dashboard*

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Here are just a few examples of insights and advantages that can be provided through business intelligence:

Senior Leadership

Give leadership the quick overview they need without pulling them into the weeds. Clearly visualize cash burn, pipeline, revenue, employee engagement, and more. Learn more about Executive BI dashboards here.

Operations

BI tools can help not only track budgets, but give visual insights into financial data, potential problem areas, and overall business health. Learn more about financial BI dashboards here.

Sales

BI can help improve sales KPIs drastically through visualizing the sales cycle, displaying conversion and churn rates, tracking the pipeline, total revenue, and more. Learn more about sales BI dashboards here.

Marketing

View all marketing KPIs in one place so you can track engagement and performance, as well as conversions, cost per lead, website traffic, and analytics. Learn more about marketing BI dashboards here.

WHY DOES BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MATTER?

Being able to deduce action from data is a competitive advantage leading you to grow your customer base, improve employee productivity, and create a better product. Business intelligence enables you to know what's happening in real time, why it's happening, how to stop it or capitalize on it, and how to predict what will happen next. All of those answers are in your data.

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Download "The Benefits of Business Intelligence"

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HOW TO BEST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

So how do you access this information? There are a plethora of business intelligence tools now available that can help you to track relevant metrics. These have evolved from more old school methods like a simple spreadsheet, to more advanced solutions. And while a spreadsheet will do the job adequately, your use of data does not achieve its full potential without a more sophisticated BI tool.

A business intelligence platform like Grow will eliminate the need to manually gather, record, and organize your data. It will do everything for you: tracking and reporting relevant metrics; interpreting data in a more visual, easy-to-understand way; and collecting everything in a sleek dashboard that can be shared with your team, leadership, and stakeholders.

We are swimming in a sea of data. But only those with the tools to properly access and act on that data will be able to fully take advantage and see the benefits to their business. Those who do however, will be able to increase productivity, stay competitive, and enable the entire company to make faster, smarter decisions with the data collected.

To learn more about how you can start doing that right now and how BI can help your business, request a demo now.

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