Are you struggling to make sales, retain team members, or achieve certain goals? To solve your problem, you need clarity around the cause. No matter what you’re struggling with, the following suggestions will help you get a better idea of what’s going on.
1. Create and use a centralized business intelligence dashboard
To see the bigger picture, you need a centralized business intelligence dashboard that displays data collected from all your different sources. For example, say you’re using Google Analytics, Facebook, Excel, Dropbox, AWS, and SQL Azure. To access your data, you’ve got to log into six different accounts, making it difficult to see relationships and trends.
When you can’t see relationships and trends, you sacrifice accuracy in decision making. Utilizing business intelligence dashboard software, like datapine offers, merges different datasets so you can visualize relationships and trends at-a-glance. Seeing this data at once prevents you from making decisions based on partial information. If you’re really keen on data visualization, you can even generate maps based on your data.
2. Look at problems as symptoms of something larger
In this digital age, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint the root cause of problems. The more factors at play, the harder it is to see to the core.
The biggest obstacle is that each symptom can have a multitude of causes. For example, if you’re not making many sales, your root causes probably aren’t what you think it is.
Say you’ve got one sales person with a 90% success rate. The rest of your sales team barely breaks 10%. You might think the majority of your sales team needs to be replaced. That might not be the case.
What if you discovered your star sales rep was using his or her own sales techniques and has completely abandoned the script you wrote? What if the sales script you want your team to use doesn’t work, and your star salesperson figured out what works? You might already have a competent sales team that needs to be empowered with this new strategy. You may not have created the script, but as a business owner, you should always be open to what works.
Another example is tasks not getting completed on time. At first glance, you might think employees who don’t get tasks completed on time are lazy, slow, or not suited for the job. If you’ve told them what needs to be done, they should be able to manage their time to achieve it, right? Not exactly.
Consider the possibility that an employee’s ability to complete an assigned task might be dependent upon other factors including:
- Other dependent tasks
- The ability to obtain information they can’t get
- The ability to access files they don’t have permission to access
- The need for files or information residing in applications with a forgotten login
Some employees are lazy, but most of the time a simple task is far more than simple. If your team isn’t meeting deadlines, talk to them and find out why they’re struggling. Maybe your deadlines are too tight, or they don’t have enough time to collaborate where needed. There’s usually more to the story than just laziness.
3. Perform root cause analysis for your wins
A continuation from the point above, root cause analysis (RCA) is your best friend in business, but it’s not just for problems. If you’ve never considered performing RCA for your wins, now is the time.
Successful entrepreneurs perform RCA after a big win. It’s part of the game. Just like there can be a clear path to failure, there can also be a clear path to success. Entrepreneurs who pinpoint the source and strategy of their success are armed with the knowledge needed to repeat it.
4. Ask employees and contractors for their perspective
To understand what’s going on in your business, you need to see your business through your team’s eyes. They see more than you do on a day-to-day basis.
Talk to your team both as a group and individually. Get specific. Ask them what’s working and what isn’t. Find out what they’d do differently. Pinpoint their struggles, frustrations, blocks, and where communication and clarity are breaking down. Employees who share their experiences are your golden ticket to tightening up your ship.
Resolve problems faster with clear vision
Follow these tips to gain a clearer vision of your business. You need clear sight to improve the accuracy of your decisions and identify the root cause of your problems. No business will ever be free from problems, but you can lessen your struggles.
