When running a business, it is essential to use hard data in making decisions about the strategic direction and future of the company. You should be collecting information about your customers and best selling products as a part of your sales process, which is good start in terms of your decision making, but you will also need analytics software such as that sold by Tridant in order to get the best information.

As a senior manager, director or business owner you will need to have an overall objective for your company to work towards. This could be to open new branches, expand your operations in your current location or consolidate. Regardless of what your goal is, it needs to be realistic and you need to work towards it.

The only way to figure out if your goal is achievable for your business is to properly analyse your current business, your competition and the overall economic environment. To do this, you will need to collect data from various sources – some of which you will already have, some you will need to find ways to get from your customer base and some you will need to research.

Once you have the data you will need to use business management software to analyse it and model various possible future scenarios. This enables you to plan for a number of potential future scenarios and be ready to capitalise on any opportunities that present themselves. You will also already be prepared to recover and protect yourself if something goes wrong.

Finally, you can use the data to work out what kinds of goals are achievable, whether expanding the business is a good idea or if you need to prepare for a rough period. The collated information can be used to help you be more effective in many different business areas, from budgeting to customer engagement and presentations to shareholders.

So how do you get this information? As already mentioned, you should already have details of your sales numbers that will inform you which products bring you the biggest profits and what you sell a lot of. You will also be able to use this information to work out who your most useful staff members are, which will help you to prioritise keeping your best-performing people.

You will also find it reasonably easy to gather demographic data on your customers, as you will presumably know who you are selling to. Instituting some kind of rewards program will let you be more specific about where regular customers live and what their precise age is. You need to follow government and industry reports to see if your environment is likely to change.

Once you have the data your business analytics software will do most of the rest of the work for you! It will interpret the information you have collected for you and help you to figure out what to do in different situations. This will give you a big edge in the world of business and make your enterprise more likely to succeed.