Making decisions is the ultimate job of anybody in a position of responsibility in a business, especially if they’re ultimately in charge. As a founder, CEO or Chief Operating Officer, the majority of your job is taking high level, strategic decisions for your business. You need to inform yourself so you know what the right long term goals are you need to be working towards, as well as dealing with the day to day issues that arise as part of running any complicated organisation.
It’s a cause of stress: successful CEOs command high salaries not just because they create success for businesses but because they are capable of handling the stress of being the person with whom the buck stops. Today we’re looking at a way of making decisions that makes that stress easier to handle, and makes the business of running a company less taxing and easier to succeed at.
Lifting the Load
The mains source of that CEO stress and isolation is that the responsibility for your decisions is concentrated solely on you. You might seek feedback, or talk to experts in the field, but the ultimate decision comes down to you and your judgement.
If you build data into your decision-making process, you lift this crushing load. It’s no longer you and best instincts, you have measures of your business’ performance, of customer behaviour and market forces to work with. The very best data experts can turn those into reliable predictions about the outcome of your decisions.
Using data like this gives you an objective foundation to your process. You don’t have to justify your decisions simply with your judgement and experience, you can point to a prediction about how this choice will likely result in a positive outcome for your business, while another would cause a poorer result.
Data Gathering
Consumer intelligence agencies can give you an insight into your market: the many consumers out there who could potentially choose to spend their money with you, whether they have yet or not.
This kind of insight can inform every level of your business: for marketing and product design it’s obvious. Understanding your market lets you tailor your offering to appeal to biggest possible cross section of people, and communicate what you have to offer in a way they’ll respond to.
It can also influence your customer service policy, informing whether they’d respond well to a generous policy, and letting you know the platforms your customers value being able to engage on, whether it’s phone, email or via social media.
Building data use into your business from the ground up – and showing you really listen to hard, evidence based feedback creates a constructive company culture that can survive successfully in the long term.