Business insights – how do we get there? 

Strategy is set, and the business should grow in a sustainable way. So, how do we get there — and show the progress? Your sparring partner, analytics, gives you insights, but on its own it is not enough. Let’s break down the path forward — the green dotted line — into a couple of concrete data points and discuss how they can give you business insights, support forecasting, and help you take action. History — the blue line — will help and give you some keys, but there is more to come. 

Few of us can predict the future, but a good start is to zoom out the green line — the vision — and cut it into pieces. For many organisations across Sweden and Finland, that is where scenario planning, data-driven decision-making, and user-friendly analytics start to become practical rather than abstract. 

Piece one – your beloved customers 

You should find good insights in the history — the blue line. Some customers will stay for many years and buy more products or services from you. Data such as buying patterns, seasonal trends, existing projects, or your top products will give you a view. Sales orders, bookings, or timesheets are facts to sum up. 

Did you know that people working with analytics and dimensional models often call transaction-based data a fact table? Microsoft’s dimensional-modeling guidance explicitly states that, in a dimensional model, a fact table stores measurements associated with observations or events, and gives examples such as sales orders and other transaction-generated data being loaded into a fact table for analysis.  

Piece two – your future customers 

Every signed deal has a story, and maybe your last won deal started with a good lunch. Added to the CRM system with an early buying signal and an estimated value, it is then step by step converted into a contracted value. In the end, you should bring facts such as done deals not yet started together with some weighted estimated value to understand the green line a bit better. 

That is where pipeline insights, sales forecasting, and customer analytics begin to support the bigger business vision. 

Piece three – sustainable products to come 

Research & Development is working hard to launch better products with less plastic or products that are easier to repair. One day they are ready for the market, and they will contribute to making the green line even greener. Add facts such as your best forecast with rough estimates as piece number three. 

New products usually have supporting data points such as market campaigns to increase the hit rate of new sales. However, campaigns are often hard to convert into real sales figures. 

Piece four – the missing piece 

Whatever target you need to hit, there will always be missing data points. Some can easily be calculated in Excel — for example, higher prices or hiring more employees in delivery — but they can still be hard to realise. To fulfil the gap, you might need better market understanding or to train existing staff in new skills. In a nutshell, you will have a list of action gaps to be able to reach the green line. 

Those gaps can also be visualized and communicated to keep the organisation informed. 

Close the loop 

Just as generative AI writes the next word based on what is most likely to follow from the previous text, businesses should place informed bets to increase their chances of success. Microsoft’s prompt-engineering guidance explicitly states that generative language models attempt to produce the next series of words that are most likely to follow from the previous text.  

Analyse your history — the blue line — and find your strengths, whether that is a specific industry, market, or way of working. Easier said than done, but with good data, a stronger data platform, user-friendly reports, and a bit of AI-driven insight, the probability of staying on the right path can improve. 

Author:  Magnus Fälth, Consultant, Epical.  LinkedIn