Running a business is about making decisions…lots of them. From deciding where to spend your marketing budget, to determining which product lines to add, to understanding which areas of your business are most profitable. And here’s the hard truth: your decisions are only as good as the data you have in front of you.
A lot of businesses get off the ground based on business owners and executives making decisions from gut feel. This can be used to get it going, but this DOES NOT work to get a company to grow beyond an initial phase.
Example
Let’s take the example of a smart home installation company. They help people install entertainment systems, special lighting, motorized shades etc. They get leads coming in from different sources—Google Ads, Facebook, referrals, postcards and SEO. The team is managing all these different tactics, spending money, and generally seeing how their sales are going.
Sales go down, and without having the information of where these leads come from, the only conclusion is that marketing is not working. So they make marketing changes, sales stay the same or improve a bit and then go back down even more.
So what’s the issue?
Another company, in the same industry experiences the exact same thing, but they start with looking at the information they have in GrandCentr.al. They look at the reports and see that the number of leads decreased, but not at the same rate that their revenue did. Because they can see all the different lead sources and revenue generated from them, they can see which marketing channels are profitable and which are not. They can make adjustments to the marketing tactics, but that is not the entire picture.
Sales are impacted by leads, but also what we call “personal experience”. This is what happens when a lead is received and what the sales team does with the lead to convert it to a sale.
So the Sales Manager reviews their deals board and sees that the leads were being followed up in minutes and because of some staff changes, that time is now a couple hours or days.
Here is a statistic about what happens when you take longer to respond to leads:
The likelihood of reaching shoppers within five minutes is 10 times higher than if you were to let 10 minutes elapse.
They start working very hard on getting the time to initial contact to be as close to instant as possible. By lowering this time, they find the number of scheduled appointments increasing a lot and as a result their sales start going up (without even having to change the spend or approach on marketing).
The Cost of Not Knowing
The scary part? We’ve seen companies cancel services that were benefiting them, simply because they didn’t know it was working. Or not cut services they should have, because they “feel” that it’s working. They couldn’t see the bigger picture. And who could blame them? When you don’t have the right information in front of you, it’s easy to make decisions that hurt your business instead of helping it.
One client we worked with was on the verge of cutting a major advertising platform. They believed it was underperforming, and that cutting it would free up cash for other marketing activities. But when they finally looked at the data—really looked at it—they realized that platform was responsible for a significant percentage of their highest-value customers. Without that information, they would have pulled the plug on a service that was quietly driving growth.
It’s All About Visibility
You need to see what’s really happening in your business. Whether it’s marketing, sales, customer support, or operations, data isn’t just something that’s nice to have—it’s essential. If you can’t see where your revenue is coming from, which products are the most profitable, or which services are driving customer satisfaction, how can you make the right calls? You can’t.
The Solution: One Source of Truth
This is why we built GrandCentr.al. We’ve seen too many businesses get bogged down by disjointed software and fragmented data. With GrandCentr.al, you get a single platform where all your business data comes together—from leads, to sales, to project management, to billing. You can track everything, and more importantly, you can connect the dots.
When you have everything in one place, decision-making gets a whole lot easier. You can see which campaigns are working, where your money is going, and which areas of your business need more attention. Instead of guessing, you can make informed decisions backed by real data.
Make Decisions That Move You Forward
The bottom line is this: without the right data, even the smartest business owners can make bad decisions. But when you have visibility into what’s really happening in your business, you can make decisions that move you forward.
So, before you make your next big decision, ask yourself: do you have the data to back it up? If not, it might be time to rethink how you’re running your business. And remember, it’s not about collecting more software tools—it’s about having the right information at your fingertips to run your business with confidence.
If you have any questions, or like to know more, click here to schedule a call with Kaeio