When you have decisions to make for your business – and that’s almost every day – then what you need is insight. Insights  aren’t merely knowledge, they’re nuggets of data that come with actionable explanations: what each data point means and how you can use it to get the results you want from your business. In business terms an insight is a story: a short, easy to understand story that tells you why something specific has happened with your business and what you can do to change it.

The value of business insight speaks for itself, so today we’re talking about where you can get some of the most important insights to drive successful decision making for your business.

Planning the Future

It’s important to have a deep strategy for your business. If you don’t know where you want to go, there’s nothing to unify your day to day decisions, and the most pragmatic answers to a dozen different questions don’t necessarily add up to a coherent brand. Measuring your short term decisions against how they contribute to your long term strategy is vital.

Planning that strategy requires specialist insights that you may simply not have the skills to generate for yourself: you need to be able to predict the future in a gamut of different ways. In most cases, it’s more efficient and worthwhile to remain an expert in your business and get the prediction insights from experts in their field. If you’re looking for strategy consulting firms, London is the place to start.

Understanding Your Customers

Your customers should have a voice in every decision you make for your business. If what you’re doing isn’t tuned to what the people you’re selling to want, then you risk losing your money and your audience.

You can do some basic customer research yourself, surveying people who walk into your shop or buy from you online, but this doesn’t give you the reach for the broad understanding that you need to derive helpful insights for your business. It’s also far from likely you’ll have the expertise to interpret your data successfully. Market research specialists are well worth consulting to get the data insights about your audience that you need to drive success.

Understanding Your Business

It might seem counter-intuitive to look elsewhere for insights into your own business, but there are useful things you can learn from operations consultants. It’s about recognising that though you’re an expert in your domain, whether it’s digital marketing or shoe manufacture, you may not be an expert in employment structures or logistics solutions. Simply learning your capacity – how much you can do – is a vital insight when you’re planning for sales and product launches.