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Peerview Data Insights

Beware the Silicon Valley Surprise!

Will your company still be in business a few years from now? 

Start-ups aside, most business owners and executives will answer "yes" and then chalk it up to strong growth, good margins, talented leadership, dedicated employees, the fact that the company's been in business for decades, etc.

All of which may be true.

Unfortunately, all those assumptions are grounded in the belief that momentum and trajectory are fixed — not 100%, because any company can stumble, but enough such that the average company can expect to do as well tomorrow as it's doing today as long as it just keeps doing what it's doing.

Maybe once upon a time that was the case, but not now.

The new reality is this: there isn't an industry anywhere that's more than one Silicon Valley surprise away from being disrupted.

Think Uber.

Think Netflix.

Think Tesla.

Think Airbnb.

Think Zenefits. (Pre-scandal.)

And then think about an upstart within your industry that's just about to launch with some product, service or approach that you dismissed as unworkable, delayed as impractical or just didn't think of yet.

How do you compete against an unknown like that?

You don't, not until it happens but you do prepare for it by focusing on two things:

  1. Strength
  2. Flexibility

Most disruptions don't render entire industries obsolete overnight; introducing something new and convincing customers to adopt it takes time. 

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business Disruption

Drucker on benchmarking

 

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

Two Mindsets Guaranteed To Stunt Your Company's Growth

If you've ever wondered why there's such a clear connection between leveraging your competitive strengths, strengthening your competitive weaknesses, exploiting your competitive advantages and increasing your growth and profitability, there are two simple reasons:

  1. Nobody is an industry of one.
  2. Everybody competes for customers and clients.

Given this, you'd think every company would treat competitive benchmarking as more of a priority, but most don't.

Why not?

To put it bluntly, it seems to come down to one of two mindsets: 

  • Ignorance
  • Arrogance

Ignorance is "No, because it wouldn't help us get better."

arrogance is "No, because we're already great."

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

Separating the good from the bad: what peak-performing marketers do differently in one slide

What separates good marketers from bad marketers?

According to Salesforce’s 2016 State of Marketing report, "extensively using" these five data-driven tools and technologies are at the heart of their success:

  • marketing analytics (aggregating and benchmarking internal and external performance data to help determine your marketing who, what, when, why and how)
  • customer targeting and segmentation (using internal and external performance data to determine who gets what, when, why and how)
  • marketing automation (using internal and external performance data to program what, when and how)
  • agile marketing (test → measure → revise → repeat, with benchmarks differentiating "winners" from "losers")
  • predictive intelligence (using internal and external performance data to estimate future actions or outcomes)

 How many do you use?

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Topics: Money Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

The 20 Most Important Metrics In Business: Cash Flow

PLEASE NOTE: the following is an excerpt from "20 Competitive Metrics Every Business Needs to Know," which is now available as a free download here.

Performance MetricCASH FLOW

Definition:  A MEASUREMENT OF THE AMOUNT OF MONEY A COMPANY HAS GENERATED OVER A SPECIFIC PERIOD OF TIME

Importance:  Cash flow shows how money moves into a company, how long it stays there, whether or not there is a sufficient amount of it to provide for day-to-day operations, and how it flows out of the company. The challenge is that even “profitable” companies can go broke because they had all their money tied up in assets and couldn’t pay their expenses. This means that no matter what a company is focused on — growth, profitability or value — it can’t survive without adequate cash flow, which is why they say “revenue is vanity, cash flow is sanity.”

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business big data

The 20 Most Important Metrics In Business: Leverage

PLEASE NOTE: the following is an excerpt from "20 Competitive Metrics Every Business Needs to Know," which is now available as a free download here.

Performance MetricLEVERAGE

Definition:  A MEASUREMENT OF HOW A COMPANY USES DEBT TO FURTHER ITS OPERATIONS

Importance:  Companies use debt to acquire assets in the hope that the income generated from those assets will be greater than the cost to service that debt over time. In most cases, the greater the debt the greater the risk because a company that is highly leveraged is more likely to go bankrupt than one that isn't. On the other hand, a company that has very low levels of debt may not taking advantage of the growth opportunities that additional leverage may offer. 

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business big data

The Power of Being In-the-Know (and How to Find the Time To Be)

 

 

Nobody is an industry of one. Everybody competes for customers. You can't beat anyone if you're evaluating your performance in a vacuum

Nobody needs another report.

As one of our clients said, "I already get fat stacks of business performance data, what I don't have is enough time to go through them unless there's a problem."

Sound familiar?

Most of us are too busy running our business to ever really take a step back and analyze it.

The problem with running your business this way is this: it's a huge miss.

In study after study, Salesforce.com, Bain & Co., Constant Contact, Accenture and GE all found that companies that analyze their performance data do better:

  • 2x more likely to have top-quartile performance
  • 5x more likely to make faster decisions
  • 8x more likely to report positive outcomes of any kind

So what's holding everyone else back?

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

The 20 Most Important Metrics In Business: Liquidity

PLEASE NOTE: the following is an excerpt from "20 Competitive Metrics Every Business Needs to Know," which is now available as a free download here.

Performance MetricLIQUIDITY

Definition:  A MEASUREMENT OF A COMPANY'S ABILITY TO SATISFY ITS SHORT-TERM OBLIGATIONS AS AND WHEN THEY FALL DUE

Importance:  From a practical standpoint, liquidity matters because a company that doesn't have enough money on hand to make payroll, cut checks to suppliers and keep its lights on can't stay in business very long. More importantly, because it's so critical to a company's on-going success, it also serves as an indirect measure of management's core competency — if a CEO or CFO can't adequately plan for the inevitable ups and downs, what else is he or she missing?

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business big data

Why even bother with business data if you don't have time to do anything with it?

Nobody needs another report.

As one of our clients said, "I already get fat stacks of business performance data, what I don't have is enough time to go through them unless there's a problem."

Sound familiar?

Most of us are too busy running our business to ever really take a step back and analyze it.

The problem is this: that's a huge miss.

In study after study, Salesforce.com, Bain & Co., Constant Contact, Accenture and GE all found that companies that analyze their performance data do better:

  • 2x more likely to have top-quartile performance
  • 5x more likely to make faster decisions
  • 8x more likely to report positive outcomes of any kind

So what's holding everyone else back?

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business

The 20 Most Important Metrics In Business: Profitability

PLEASE NOTE: the following is an excerpt from "20 Competitive Metrics Every Business Needs to Know," which is now available as a free download here.

Performance MetricPROFITABILITY

Definition:  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TOTAL REVENUE AND TOTAL EXPENSES

Importance:  Sometimes profit is meaningful, sometimes it isn't.

Insight:  Because it can be manipulated via the timing or choice of various accounting methods, it can say more about owner/management priorities and/or industry traditions than a company's ability to generate revenue while controlling costs. For this reason, analysts rely on common-sized, comparative ratios to put "profitability" in context so they can more accurately gauge how effectively or ineffectively a company is being operated.

Topics: Money People Customers Planning & Forecasting Competitive Analytics KPIs Business Performance Small Business big data