Monitoring performance of your products or services is vital to provide you with the business intelligence you need.
It enables you to evaluate how successful you are, where you need to improve and what challenges you face.
It’s not just about the bottom line.
You won’t even have a bottom line if you don’t measure your performance adequately and use the information to boost your business strategy.
Here are 4 critical reasons to monitor your product performance data.
Reason #1: Identifying Market Trends
Identifying the trends in your market place helps you to build on developments in your industry for the benefit of your product or service. The use of tools for advanced analytics allows you to:
- Know how your business has performed in specific areas or aspects, so you can duplicate your successes
- Identify areas where you are under-performing, with evidence that can help shape your decision-making
- Highlight any consistent results to support your various hypotheses.
By using historical data you can see how the cycles in your industry shift and eliminate uncertainties caused by slow sales, oversupply of inventory and fluctuating customer demand.
Reason #2: Boosting Market Share
Monitoring your product’s performance in the market enables you to understand your current market share, why you have it and what helps to boost it. Your market research gives you information on the size of your potential market place, and enable you to determine what percentage you currently hold. Once you know this, you can use analytics to determine why your product or service does well in some segments and less well in others, and make any changes necessary to boost your market share in the lower-performing areas. The intelligence also benefits your competitive advantage by giving you a quantifiable position in your industry.
Reason #3: Forecasting the Future
We all want to know what the future holds for our company, but wild predictions made without a scientific basis aren’t going to get you far. Business forecasting is more of a science than an art, and it’s usually grounded in a “planning for the worst while expecting the best” scenario. To predict accurately, you need a comprehensive business strategy based on reliable information that takes account of industry trends, market share, successes and failures.
Reason #4: Informing Communications
Everyone loves a great story, especially when it’s backed up by irrefutable facts and figures. Without ongoing monitoring of your products and services, you won’t have concrete statistics to use in your press releases, blog posts, sales material and social media threads. You don’t have to quote a ton of stats in everything you publish—just use them as hyperlinks to provide substance and in case anyone questions your claims.
Using the Information
The information gathered through product monitoring is very suitable for use in customer proposals and for boosting your reputation in the market. It’s one thing to say your product is performing well; it’s another entirely to be able to show the degree to which it’s doing so. Start monitoring your performance using analytics tools and you’ll see an improvement in the quality and consistency of decision-making in your business.
Related post: What Is Market Research and Why Is It Important?
