There are emotions and facts. Sometimes they confirm each other but very often they contradict each other. I have noticed this with myself as an entrepreneur. I originally wanted to live my dream and work as a coach. But the numbers spoke for themselves. I earned money faster when I was active on the internet. When I started writing articles as a blogger, I found that the articles I had put the most heart and soul into were the ones that did the worst. So who to follow? The feelings or the statistics? Fortunately, today I separate heart and business.
Emotions – bad for business?
Over the years as an entrepreneur, I have met all kinds of people. In the process, I have come to know a category of people that I now call perseverers. They are the business people who won’t sell you something because it doesn’t fit with what they started their company for. For example, I wanted to use the link service of an SEO agency. I had a client for whom I wanted to buy 30 backlinks. A loose task that would have brought the agency a lot of money and was easy to fulfil. The operator of the SEO agency would have earned good money with it. But he didn’t want to do it. After all, they were an SEO agency and not an agency for link sales. Does that matter if you can make a lot of money with easy work? Well, his problem.
IBM had slid into a crisis in the 1980s. It had become accustomed to easily selling everything it produced. So the company limited itself mainly to selling hardware. But at some point, they realised that they could make a fortune with service. Customers asked for it, it was ignored for a long time. Fortunately, a new board of directors no longer insisted, but reacted correctly. Because not only did they earn good money with the service, but a lot of data and information about their needs was generated there.
So in my life I have moved to simply looking at the numbers: Where is it going well? Where are things going badly? I continue where the most money comes from. And if I can’t always do what I like best in return, then I can live with that.
In my case, the data I needed for this was straight from the huge Google Analytics figures. There I could see what the readers liked and what they didn’t. Likewise the numbers from YouTube. With their help, I made videos, some of which have reached hundreds of thousands of views.
The huge power of data
Using the right data has massively boosted my business. And now I’m still a small fish. The ones who really made money with it were mainly Google and Amazon. Amazon, for example, was better than ever at analysing buyer behaviour. Their reference to “customers who bought this also bought…” has become legendary. A huge innovation at the time. Later, Facebook came along and also became a huge data octopus, it must be said already today. But they also showed how powerful such tools are. Because it is an open secret that they merge the material from their subsidiary companies: Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. So that’s the big secret: merging.
This is also important for your company. You don’t have to become a greedy data sucker and rip off people’s secrets via spy software. It’s about bringing together the right data. For this, of course, it is important that you use sufficiently modern solutions, such as IBM Informix or similar. See the video here:
The reason for this is that you don’t just combine numbers and letters anymore, but time series and geodata and so on – depending on what the purpose of the company is.
That this works well is proven today by numerous companies that are leaders in data analysis. Some of them have managed to make particularly good use of your input from the databases. They now build artificial intelligence-powered robots that make accurate predictions about which customers will buy which products at what time. These then create automated campaigns on social media, and make money for their operators with almost no work.
My recommendation is therefore: think about what information you are already sitting on and how you can gain additional ones. Then analyse how their composition can result in an improved sales situation.