Sales and marketing teams are both in charge of impacting lead generation and revenue which is why they are very important in any company or organization. Whether you are working on attracting new customers and getting people interested in products and services or trying to sell them what you are offering, data-driven decision-making is something that your teams would highly benefit from. We will show you how beautifully visualized data can bring value to your business.
What is data visualization?
Data visualization is a graphical representation of data. So, instead of looking at multiple data sources, you are able to look at a few visualizations and make conclusions based on what you are seeing.
The image above shows some of the many data visualization formats that you can use to represent your data.
How can data visualization improve your business?
Data integration
Imagine having a visual representation of all your data at one place so all your teams can use it. This representation would provide a common platform that shows how your business is performing. Having everything in one place enables you to easily notice patterns and react when needed.
Communication
Numbers don’t lie. When one platform hosts all your data, it is easy to communicate with your teams about their progress and how each team contributes to company’s goals. Also, all teams are able to track their progress any time and check whether there is anything that can be improved.
Communication with your clients, stakeholders, investors can also be improved as your statements are always supported with data.
Accessibility
The platform that you use for visualization should be for everyone in your organization, which is why we recommend working with a platform that supports role management.
Everyone should be able to access the information they need. Teams that understand their impact on the company and how to reach certain goals could also see how to be more efficient and which decisions lead to better outcomes.
Trend tracking and planning
Having all your data in one place also means that over time you will start noticing some trends. You might notice that in certain months of the year your company profits more or your product is easily sold in some industry branches while it needs more work in others.
Once you start noticing trends, you will also be able to make more efficient plans and strategies to reach your goals.
Also, teams would be able to track their progress, plan their work more efficiently and understand what impacts their performance.
Having a platform that can help you plan and define strategies by predicting values that you need using machine learning can also be very beneficial.
Alerting
What happens when something goes wrong and you notice it too late? Or, you might be close to achieving your goals without even realizing it. Whether you have your data visualized or not, it is good to be able to react to certain situations once they occur. Maybe your team is falling behind which will further influence your profits or maybe you are very close to earning your first million. In any scenario, if you are someone who is aware of the company’s status at any point and if you are able to react promptly to any inconsistencies, it could greatly influence your company’s performance. We recommend working on a platform that supports alerting so you don’t miss anything that is important to you.
Goal monitoring
By monitoring your company’s performance towards achieving certain goals, you are able to effectively apply strategies when needed.
All teams are also able to check how they are performing as a comprehensive team towards achieving a particular goal.
Again, having data in one place makes a huge difference as all your data is crunched automatically and nobody needs to analyse each team’s report in order to come to conclusions.
Decision making
Finally, let’s talk about data-driven decision making. Using data and metrics, you are able to make strategic decisions that align with your visions and goals.
What makes data-driven decision making better? The data you can collect about your company can be enormous – from data about a single employee to a company as a whole. Knowing where you stand, what your goals are and how are you performing makes decision making smarter and that much easier. But, keep in mind that making decisions using a large amount of data can also be extremely complex and many companies struggle to create a data-driven culture. That is why visualization, machine learning for predictions, alerting and automating the process of generating valuable insights makes a big difference.
Why Power BI?
Power BI is a business intelligence service provided by Microsoft. By connecting your data to Power BI and processing it, it can offer insights through visually appealing reports. It is easy to connect to different data sources, model data, and create personalized reports.
We chose Power BI because it allows you to access and analyze a large amount of data. We have also enjoyed preparing data for visualization. Usually, this can be a very tedious process, but Power BI made it easy for anyone to use.
Power BI offers a number of charts, so you are able to present your data the way it suits you the most. It is easy to create insights, spot trends and make decisions when having beautifully represented data. We will show how having a report can be useful in making decisions.
Example
Here we will demonstrate a simple dashboard that we have created, just so you can get an impression on how easy it is to read insights from a dashboard and track how your business is performing.
We have used a publicly available dataset that contains sales information for video games. Every time someone buys a game, information about that purchase is stored. Imagine how much data that is, and imagine how time-consuming it would be to generate insights using raw data.
Now let’s take a look at the dashboard that we have created. It is just a simple example and it doesn’t contain a lot of information, but keep in mind that it is an interactive dashboard and you will probably find most of the information you are looking for.
First of all, you can notice that the video game business is very profitable; that action, sports and shooter games are best selling. You can also see that some of the most profitable publishers are Activision (CoD publisher), EA (FIFA publisher), Nintendo (Super Mario publisher), Take-Two Interactive (GTA publisher), Ubisoft (Assassin’s creed publisher). From the data, it is clear that the most profitable platforms are Playstations, Xbox, Nintendo, personal computers and Game Boy. Whether you are looking to buy or create or sell video games, taking a look at a dashboard will tell you what is popular, what is everyone buying, which platforms are being used and for which video games.
We have also enjoyed how interactive Power BI dashboards are. Click at what interests you the most and you will get all other charts adjusted to what you’re looking for.
Need to drill through your data to get more insights? No problem! Screenshot above shows how we drilled through a treemap to search for the most popular publisher by platform by genre.
Knowing your data and extracting information from it should be this simple! Good visualizations enable you to do so in a matter of seconds. Having a tool that crunches your numbers for you, enables you to know how your company is performing just by glancing over the dashboard.
How can Power BI help you bridge the gap between data and decision making?
We found most of the Power BI features very easy to use. Also, you can integrate it with many existing business management platforms if you are considering moving to Power BI.
Power BI can handle large quantities of data which is not the case with many other platforms. You can visualize your data using a number of charts and templates, and there are even built-in powerful machine learning algorithms that can help you make smarter decisions. To make sure you make decisions right on time, Power BI offers alerts, so you are notified every time an action is needed, therefore reducing time you spend looking at your dashboards.
Representing data in such a way makes it easier to notice patterns, communicate findings and monitor your goals.
Is Power BI for you?
In our opinion, it depends on what you expect from it. If you need a quick solution, having many already implemented features right at your fingertips that work well is a good choice. If you are a small business that would like to track its performance, this could be a very good option for you – it is inexpensive and you can get what you want pretty fast. However, needing and using Power BI Premium over a long period might not be the most cost-efficient way, because creating a custom solution could be a better option in the long run.
We have really enjoyed using Power BI and the features it offers. It is a great tool for data analysis and visualisations and is definitely something that we would gladly recommend to anyone who would benefit from more insights into their data.
