Peerview Data Insights

Surprised?

One thing we've learned working with small businesses over the years is that most of them view marketing & advertising as an expense, not an investment.

Most of their money goes to what are increasingly just "price-of-entry" touch points:

• Web sites
• Blogs
• Social Media accounts
• Promotional items
• Trade shows & conferences

Are they missing an opportunity?

What are your employees really worth?

For a lot of us, when we're happy with them they're priceless; when we're not, they're worthless.

Unfortunately, that kind of gut-level assessment isn't very objective.

That's why we analyzed performance data from over 1000 professional services companies (law firms, ad agencies, architects, engineers, accountants, etc.) to see if there was a better benchmark for productivity.

Our findings?

For most companies, a good target range is between $150k to $200k in revenue-per-employee.

That's not to say that there weren't industry differences — law firms, for example, average a bit more than accountants — or regional differences — coastal cities were higher than Midwestern suburbs  — but most fell into that range.

Why?

Do followers and connections make a difference?

Maybe.

After analyzing data from about 2300 companies (mostly professional and financial services, but also retail, manufacturing and healthcare) we noticed an interesting link between fast-growing companies and the social media footprints of the owners and executives behind them, particularly in terms of LinkedIN connections.

When we looked at Twitter, Facebook and company pages on LinkedIN, high-growth companies usually had a more robust presence than slow- or no-growth companies, but the difference wasn't nearly as pronounced as when we compared the # of LinkedIN connections among owners and executives: High-growth owners/executives averaged nearly 2.5 times the connections of slow or no-growth companies, 500+ vs. <200.

(We ignored Google+ — sorry, Google — and are still gathering info on Instagram.)

It's important to note that correlation is not causation, and the link didn't hold 100% of the time among the companies we sampled.

Salesforce just released its annual State of Analytics study and it's worth reading.

You can get the entire report here if you share your contact information with Salesforce, but Forbes has broken out a few of the the key findings:

• Analyzing your performance data is the key to staying competitive: "High performing enterprises are 8.2x more likely than underperformers to primarily use analytics tools to gain strategic insights."

Corporate retreat?

Company Ferrari?

Picasso for the boardroom?

If you're like the small-to-medium-sized companies cited in a just-released IDG_Enterprise survey, you'll be spending that amount over the next 12 months on data.

Surprised?

As you would expect, we believe in learning form data.

To that end, we're testing four landing pages using Twitter and Adwords and sharing the results. (The way we see it, any insights that help you, help us, too, by generating goodwill.)

As you'll see if youre curious, each page covers our core offering — a strategic management & planning tool that shows companies how they're doing compared to peers and peak performers and where they should be doing better — but has a slightly different hook.

Options:

Inspiration. Desperation. Perspiration.