Data Driven Decision Making | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 12

Be Less Stupid

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Be Less Stupid 〰️

Data Driven Decision Making

Reports and analytics can help report the health of any business, though we all have different metrics. Data provide clues on where the friction points within the user experience are. When we base decisions on hard data instead of feelings we can create a resolution with confidence. Business analytics are important for making good decisions for a strong profitable business.

It isn’t profitable to run a business based on how everyone feels, business decisions should be made based on data because sometimes people feel great and business is doing horrible and other times businesses are doing great and people don’t feel good. How employees feel is important but isn’t what business decisions should be based on, employees’ feelings are helpful when making decisions regarding internal user experience or rating process.

What Data Should Be Collected?

Data collection shouldn’t turn into busywork. It should only be collected if it can be used to analyze the current, previous, and future state of the business.

A good way to decide what data needs to be collected is to think about the numerous data points that are collected throughout the system and all the points we could track, then decide what points from those are the most important to the business.

For example, in a sales-based business, some of the data points that are the most relevant to the business’s health would be the average sales, demos completed, demos scheduled, and overall office or team sales. All these data points are important and can be picked apart during a team meeting for instance. When there is data, questions can be asked then resolution and improvement can occur.

How To Collect This Data

Every department has an individual set of KPRs that need to be tracked. After deciding what data should be tracked for each department a report needs to be created to collect that data in a way that is both easy for the department to report and also easily received.

We want these updates to be per department, consistent, and painless. These updates should just show up in our inbox ready to be analyzed and discussed and this is why automation of data and self-reported data collection is so important. This way we stay updated in real-time on what is happening within the business instead of being forced to wait for updates till department meetings.

Self-reporting data is a fantastic starting point but it can have a few traps which are mainly human error.

Not doing it
Lying about their data
Typos

How To Avoid Human Error

If you haven’t been to business school and you haven’t gotten comfortable with excel or google sheets these are two topics you should educate yourself on. Excel and google sheets can be intimidating at first but once learned it is quite easy. Like riding a bike. Several youtube tutorials can help with the creation of reports and analytics and the use of these technologies. Conditional formatting is a great tool accessible using these technologies, this tool is helpful to highlight specific data within a pool to see who is doing well and who needs help.

There are also reporting experts who will set up an automated report program with you. You can hire out for this process.

Another problem that often occurs is the disruption of communication from one program to another. There are software aggregators that can connect to the two software systems to pull data in real-time to help them communicate with each other. Depending on budget, how much a report and analytics program is worth to a business, and the business size decides what type of automation is needed.

Raw data collection can be expensive but it’s extremely important. This is where we can find the changes that need to be discussed or changed ASAP. If we don’t see what the problem is, we won’t be able to solve anything.

If we want to advance our business we have to begin thinking differently. How can we free up our time from collecting reports by creating automated reports that are helpful to the business? We want to be sure to collect meaningful and useful data that will shine a light on points for progress.

Mike Abramowitz 0:11
Welcome to the better than rich show with your hosts Andrew Biggs and Mike Abramowitz. The better than rich show helps ambitious leaders who are on a mission to leave the world better than they found it changed their perspective on what's important, increase their income and impact and systemize their life and business. If you've ever struggled with finding your purpose and felt disconnected or distracted or found yourself going through the motions, this show will remind you that what you do matters and will re inspire you to chase your highest dreams. It's time for you to become better than rich.

Andrew Biggs 0:44
Hello, and welcome to the better the rich Show. I'm your host, Andrew Biggs, and I'm here with my co host, Mike Abramowitz. Mike, how you doing today?

Mike Abramowitz 0:52
Always a great day, Andrew. Indeed, indeed.

Andrew Biggs 0:55
Awesome, man. Well, I'm excited to jam on today's topic, how to create reports and analytics for your business. And you know, just to dive right in, and just start adding value into people's lives. Reporting and Analytics, no matter what sort of business you run, you know, you can tell the health of your organization based upon certain metrics, for every single one of you, those metrics are going to be different, we'll talk about that. But if you don't have a really robust reporting and analytics process, then you really should consider getting one. And today should give you some building blocks for that, Mike, like when you start to think about reports, analytics metrics, these sorts of things, where's your mind go immediately, and then we can get into some nitty gritty stuff. But I'd love for you to kick us off here.

Mike Abramowitz 1:40
Yeah, it obviously depends on the business. But you know, if you're in sales, we, my mind immediately goes to the top of the funnel and collect as much data as possible in the top of the funnel. And that's, you know, in the internal and also in the external operations. So my mind goes to, if it's, you know, an external funnel of like, client generation or something, it's like, Okay, how many touches are regenerating? How many? What's the conversion of those touches into appointments that are getting set up from those appointments that are getting set up? How many are showing up from those that are showing up? How many are being converted into into closes or sales or transaction, so it's like, I want to know the data. So that way, I can see by with the numbers can give me clues as to the questions I need to ask. So the data gives me clues to the questions need to ask. And the questions then become, what is causing these numbers? Where are the friction points in the user experience? So if we base it off of real data versus our feelings, then we can actually come up with some resolution versus just something that might feel good. And we don't actually know. So the data is so important, in my opinion, when it comes to business analytics and running a profitable, effective business.

Andrew Biggs 3:01
Right. And just to like, double click on that point, you know, at its core, this is the philosophy right, from better than Rich's sort of systematic content perspective, what we want to do is make decisions off of hard data, right? With more information, you're going to make better decisions. Now that doesn't exclude like, you know, intuition. And having a really strong intuitive sense in business. We can talk about that in a later episode. This is how do I get hard data so that I have true facts to make better decisions off of. And so when you have that data, and you have at your fingertips and you're regularly looking at it, you're going to make better decisions? What I see too often is people come into a, a sales meeting, or a staff meeting, something like that, and, you know, kind of have a general sense. Maybe they have like one stat or two stats that they've been looking at. It's just like the results, right? How much did we make this week? How much was our profit, overall this month, and then that's basically how they run the meeting. They're like, Hey, guys, we're down or, Hey, we're up. They actually have no idea why they're down, why they're up how they got there, who did well who did it, and they're running that entire staff meeting off of, you know, kind of based on one staff or just based on how people feel. Hey, guys, How's everyone doing today? How's everyone feeling today? And, you know, I definitely don't want to discount the fact that we're all human beings, and everyone's coming in with a unique situation, you need to ask that question, to be in rapport with the people you lead. But also, that shouldn't be the strategy for how you make decisions. You can't be making decisions in your business based on how people feel. It's good to always be there for people, but if you're making business decisions off of how they feel, sometimes people feel really bad and businesses great. And it's like, Hey, why are you so upset? Actually, we're trending in the right direction. And then sometimes it's the opposite. People feel great and business is actually trending in the wrong direction. This It's particularly true when you start to think about what are leading indicators versus trailing indicators. Maybe your bottom line, like sales number, or profit number is actually pretty good. But there's some red flags around the corner that if you don't fix in the next three months, you're gonna have a problem in this staff meeting three months from now. So that's my little rant, Mike. But where do you want to take a next?

Mike Abramowitz 5:19
Yeah, it's important because especially if somebody is in charge of collecting the data that's in that staff meeting, you know, my, my wife was in corporate recruiting for many years, and she would collect all this data, and she would have to, you know, get all these reports, and it would take her hours, hours and hours of hours of her time to collect the data. And then there would be nothing done with the data. So she felt like it was absolutely unnecessary. It's busy work. Why don't you just let me do my job. And I'll just generate more revenue for the business versus collecting all this data, that is not necessarily doing anything, it's just busy work and taking time. And that is, there is truth to that, like if they're not using the data. So the point of the point of collecting the data is not to just collect the data, the point of collecting the data is to use it and bring it to a staff meeting where you can discuss it and dissect it, and poke at it and ask questions. So the data is not the answers, the data gives you clues for you to ask certain questions. And using like, using a specific specific example inside of a business, let's say, if you are running a, specifically a sales team, let's say if you're running a sales team? Well, the data you're going to want to know is okay. You come to a meeting, you do a team meeting or a staff meeting of some sort. What's the data? How many appointments? How many prospects do you currently have in your pipeline? How many prospects do you currently have in your pipeline? How many open tickets? Do you have that, you know, you haven't closed yet that are like kind of in the in queue? Then it's like, how many new appointments do you have currently on the schedule? How many appointments Did you set up last week? How many appointments Did you complete last week? How many orders did you place last week? How many new leads Did you generate last week. So these are the numbers that you might want to some people might call them KPIs or K RAS key result areas or key performance indicators. So they you have them report their numbers, once they report their numbers, you could have conversations around it. And what's nice about like Google Sheets, or you know, one of these technologies we could talk about in just a moment is you use conditional formatting. So if let's say if they fill out a Google form with all these numbers before, as an example, they fill out all these numbers before the meeting starts. And it auto populates into a spreadsheet. Now on this Google sheet, you can use conditional formatting for light for yellow, if it's above a certain number, and it's red, if it's below a certain number. So let's say if your baseline is 80%, or higher, is good. And I want to recognize that and 40% or lower is red. And I want to, you know, explore that. So it's red, lower, explore. At higher, let's praise, publicly praise, reprimand and private, just just just a thought for you. But the data, you could still show on the screen, say these are the numbers and automatically show the yellow and the red. And now you can have a conversation. That is the easiest way to run a staff meeting, looking at the metrics and looking at data. So that's an example of one example of many or when we could talk about how to use the data, how to collect the data, why it's important, collect the data, because then you could actually move business.

Andrew Biggs 8:34
Right? And and what Mike just did there as he broke down a specific example. But the regardless of its sales, or its customer service, or its marketing, or whatever it is, every single department of your business has those KPIs has those key areas that you just need to know? What are your specific metrics by each department? And then, you know, design the ideal report? What sort of information would you want to be seeing on a daily basis? What sort of information would you want to be seeing on a weekly basis? What about a monthly basis? How does that compare to annual projections? And you want to have that all in one spot for each department? Ideally, right? Maybe there's a couple reports, depending on how complicated your business's per department, but the more you can get one report for each department, the better, right? i The best thing to do is to make sure it's coming to you on a regular basis, and it just lands in your inbox or it just lands, you know, automatically sends you a message in Slack or teams, or it suits you a text message or whatever it is, in terms of your communication methodologies. But that should just hit your inbox should hit this should hit the conversation every single morning, ideally, automatically. So then you need to think how do I actually do that? First I need to create the KPIs. Second, I need to design the ideal report. Then I got to figure out how we're going to populate that data into that report on a daily basis. And then fourthly, I got to figure out, how is it going to hit my inbox every single morning. And, you know, Mike mentioned, you know, self reporting data. You know, as a starting point, I think self reporting data is really good. There can be some trips in, you know, traps with self reporting data, mainly just human error, right? People just either fat fingering something in or be not doing it, or see, like actively lying about this information? Oh, yeah, I actually made 100 phone calls yesterday. And actually, it turns out, they made seven. And so we have some dirty data in there. But as a starting point, for every single person, I think, when you can't get automatic data, self reporting data is really good. So who would you want to be reporting? And what what sort of tools could you use for them to send something in something like Google Forms, like Mike mentioned, is completely free, and it's so underutilized, all you got to do is go in, create a few different reports, make sure everyone has access to the links and tell them when they need to be sending in their information. And that's a really good starting point. We can get into more technical stuff in a bit but Mike, what do you think?

Mike Abramowitz 11:10
Yeah, and in to just bring it back to my wife Lindsay's example the she as a corporate recruiter, she would do like LinkedIn messages or she would work on with indeed applications and a lot of like, indeed, applications already. Analysts, they already give you a lot of the analytics, they already give you a lot of the, you know how many resumes are coming in and whatnot, LinkedIn does that. So she would so so then it would be how many of them? Did she message? How many of them she had a conversation with? What was the conversion rate on those conversations? How many got set up for those interviews? So so there was all like this? datascope? Yes, it was human, she had to, like, actually tally it up. And there wasn't a very great technology in place for her, which is partially why it was annoying, because, you know, she had to do it. And the other part of why it was even more annoying is they were nobody was looking at it. So So in that's that's the part that's really important. So it depends on the size of your business. Ideally, you know, if you have a, you know, a medium to large size business, yeah, you want to have everything as automated as possible. If you have more of a startup or a smaller size business, you just want to have something in place, so that we're just not, you know, shooting into the wind. I personally love Google Forms. I think Google Forms is fantastic. I think, you know, it's Google Sheets is, you know, again, it's free, it makes it really easy, especially a lot of what you've taught me with Google Forms, like using data validation for like checkboxes and, and, you know, creating drop down menus, so that way, they can only click what you want them to click so that way, it's it avoids a little bit of the human error, you can actually speak to that if you want, what are some strategies that you have implemented, or you want me to almost not like almost manipulated a little bit, so it avoids some of that fat fingering or some of that human error. Right?

Andrew Biggs 13:05
So there's a lot of really cool tools. In you know, if you spend a few hours on YouTube, just, you know, looking into Google Sheets, and understanding it better, some of the MBAs in the in the audience right now are like, yeah, I get it, I took several courses on Excel or whatever. You guys might already know a lot of these things. But just if you did it, right, if you didn't get to go to business school, and you never really got comfortable with Excel, you never really got comfortable with Google Sheets. You know, that's one little competency, I would definitely recommend you get better. And I was I was doing a coaching client. I'll get into some specifics, excuse me in a second, but working with somebody and they were like, yeah, just like intimidated by Google, you know, sheets in Excel. And I was like, it's one of those things, you do not need to be smart to know how to use Google Sheets. Okay. So if you're in the audience, you're like, Ah, I don't know what I'm doing. It's just simple. It's like, once you learn how to ride a bike, it's not hard. And that's what I told her. I was like, Okay, let's literally share screens, like now I'll show you exactly how I did it. And she's like, Oh, that's really easy. So understand that, you know, you shouldn't be intimidated. You just need to learn it, just like anything else in life. But a few things that I would say is using data validations Conditional Formatting. I really love to like, use the conditional formatting will where it'll color code things. And that way at a glance, it'll show me exactly who needs to be praised, who needs to be, you know, have a conversation with I also really liked that because I can use filters in Excel. So you know, that's another thing for you to look up is how to use filters. You know, I also have been playing around with VLOOKUP, where you can create kind of like a chart and you can reference that chart back. And that's a really powerful tool if you really get sophisticated with how to do that. So if you spend, you know, an hour or two poking around on YouTube, saying Like, how do I actually learn some of these tools like, you know, formulas as a starting point, if you're not familiar with formulas, and then conditional formatting data validation. And, and lastly, VLOOKUP, if you want to get super fancy, but if you get really good at this, you can create your whole reporting structure just off of Google forums, Google Sheets, and self reporting data that people are keying in. And then next thing you know, you actually have reports that people want to use that are really useful for your business on a weekly basis.

Mike Abramowitz 15:29
And you hit it spot on, because YouTube, I literally had to do this two weeks ago, because I thought I needed a pivot table for what I was trying to get done. And man, it was confusing me. So pivot tables or not,

Andrew Biggs 15:45
I'm still learning pivot tables. Another really good one. Yeah, pivot tables if you want to.

Mike Abramowitz 15:50
Yeah. But you know, it's, it was interesting, because ultimately, what I wanted is I wanted to have an each individual. So let's say there's 100 Different people entering in their own data into something like they're entering it into their own individual spreadsheet. And I want to have all of their individual information on their own individual spreadsheet, going into a master spreadsheet, a master document, so that way, I have an added glance. So say, there's 100, different spreadsheets from 100 different users, each of them have their own thing. And then I just want to add a glance, so I had to figure out okay, let's take a step back and figure out how, what is the what is the formula? What is the what makes sense? Like, how can I get a simple glance for this? And I was, you know, YouTubing it, I was asking a couple friends, I thought I was gonna need a pivot table, but it actually turned out no, you just need to, I just needed to use a simple

Andrew Biggs 16:46
equal sign. Yeah, and then just kind of click on the boxes.

Mike Abramowitz 16:50
Yeah, it was in but there's an actual equal sign, and then you can click the document, and that brings that link, and say equals that link, and then comma, then that dat that cell with an exclamation point. And then like, just brings that information over copied over boom. And now it's, it's, it's manually populating or automatically populating an at a glance. And once I figured it, figured it out and finished, I was like, Man, I feel like I just won the Superbowl man, I was like, this is cool.

Andrew Biggs 17:22
All right, and then it's gonna self update every single time someone enters in one of those hundreds, individual spreadsheets every single time where those changes, your documents gonna change. So just like, you know, Mike has set that up, basically a no cost, he has real time data and insights in his business. And it's no wonder he's always at the top of the charts in turn when it comes to competitions and wins all the trophies, and he's able to expend time with his family and travel and run a whole separate business. You know, people ask how do you do that all? Well, you need to think systematically, you need to set up how do I actually have information on my business and how it's going without being there. 24/7 inside a physical office space, just observing people, this is especially true in a virtual setting. So this is really good. You know, if you I'll do kind of a quick lesson here on? Well, by the way, one of the things I'll say is there are business intelligence, kind of like reporting experts out there, you could even hire somebody off of Fiverr off of Upwork, even if it's just for like a one time, sort of one off thing, pay him 200 300 500 bucks to design these reports for you. And they'll actually do all that Google Sheets stuff for you. If you don't feel like you know, spending six hours and you to try to figure it out. So you can just hire that out. And someone will design like really beautiful reports with you with like graphs and color codes and like all these sorts of things. And I think it's just, you know, you might say, Oh, it's $500, I don't want to spend $500, I was like it's kind of one of the best $500 You could spend is just so you have complete analytics of what you're looking at, in a really nice format. So that's, that's one thing I would just share as you can hire out for that. Also, some of you are working in businesses where there's a lot of different software's that you use right now, one of the biggest problems in business is how to get one software to talk to another x, like this stack is over here on this on this platform. This one's over here on this platform, what I need is I need one stop shop, I need an aggregate place to find these things. And you know, you can also look at software tools like like Domo or I think one other one is Zoho. There's all sorts of different products out there that are like business, business analytics, aggregation software's. There's smart sheets, which is really cool one that mostly works off of Google Sheets. These have various different prices. There's Tableau there's like all sorts of different things you can check out. So if you want to, you know also spend some time researching actual software accurate faders. And then what's cool is you can go into that design the reports through that. And then, you know, it can connect to these different software's via what's called an API, which is just basically the two computers talking to each other, the two software systems talking to each other. And so it's just constantly pulling that data, maybe you set it up to ping it every one minute, or five minutes, or 60 minutes. And so every minute, it's gonna check and see if there are any updates on Salesforce, if there are any updates on this platform, or that platform or whatever technology you're using. And it's automatically a real time gonna be updating the charts in the reports. So you can go to your dashboard, see exactly what's happening in real time with your business. Again, depending on the scale of your business, depending on the the war chest currently sitting in your bank account, and how much you you think it's worth to spend on this, you can get really sophisticated to where you can see everything at a glance. And it's all kind of moderated through technology, you can completely remove the human element for air, so I can see you smiling over there when he's smiling.

Mike Abramowitz 21:04
That's why I love working with the brother, because, you know, this is, this is what you bring to me because I've always worked inside of like my small business, and you teaching me how to corporatize my small business because you had this experience of overseeing over 200 directly and 13 1400 overall. So to be able to, you know, communicate with the hundreds people 1500 plus people, you had to make sure it was very simple and very organized. And so I love hearing the way you're talking about this, because I'm like, Alright, I'm not there with my smaller business, but the conceptually how can I bring that into my smaller business, so I can, you know, get the exact same outcome, which is to free my time up and free up my intellectual capacity and my creative genius, so I can use that for other parts of analyzing the business and growing the business and evolving it. So sometimes we got to, you know, corporatize our bit, I don't care if you're a solopreneur, you know, just thinking about it in these terms, I think is really beneficial. So I, you know, I that's like my nerd, my geek, Geek hat, you know, I'm hearing you talk about all these technologies and stuff. I'm like, Man, that's, uh, it's just impressive. So So for me, what I received from that is, if you're listening, and you're like me, a couple years ago, when Andrew was teaching me a lot of this, I'm like, alright, what is what is my version of this, this this simple version of what Andrew just said. So we came up with our own like model of how to collect the data, and how to input that data. And you know, and now we're starting to get a little bit more sophisticated as the time goes on. But they had a click for me. So one of the simple ways that we do it is if the user say, if you have, you know, using that number of 100, maybe it's 10. Let's just go with 10. So you have 10, individual individuals that you want to get data from. So we want to make it as easy as possible for them to communicate their data. So let's say you have a platform, Telegram, Discord, WhatsApp, Slack, whatever it might be, you have them, you give them a template, and you say, I need you to fill out this template, maybe that template is in a Google form, or that template is inside of the app, the communication app, either way, you give them a template, they input their data into that template, then what I do is I have my virtual assistant, she goes in if it's in the in like the discord or in the telegram, or in the WhatsApp, she takes that and manually enters that into a spreadsheet. So even though it's not like sophisticated, where all these software's are communicating with another, it's getting the exact same outcome, which is the data goes into a spreadsheet that I can see at a glance, that's what matters most if, as the CEO of the enterprise. So I need to have an added glance picture. So whether the VA does it or whatnot. But I didn't want to do and I don't want to do and I don't encourage is just giving access to those 10 people to input it directly into the spreadsheet. Because what I've experienced in the past there is the spreadsheet gets messed up, someone enters it into the wrong line, somebody accidentally deletes somebody else's row and it gets really messy. So I learned that, you know, the hard way a couple of times. So that's why it's important to not just give them access to the spreadsheet, give them access to either a form that auto populates to a spreadsheet or in the communication Chat, where you could have someone else, you know, input that. So then once you have it and you'd have this for each department, so say if you have, you know, a department here and you know, let's say it's, you know, touch to interview, and then it's like interview to training like onboarding, and then it's like training them into launching them into sales right and you have these different sectors of the business, you're going to want to have a different sheet, or a different tab for each of those departments? Because there's gonna be different metrics to analyze there. So very simple way, you just want to try to think about what are the K RAS? What are the points of data that you want to know, like the and what's interesting is I did this exercise with my staff. I said, what are all the what are all the possible data points, we made a giant, every single department, what are all the possible pieces of data, and we came up with for four departments, there must be over 100 different data points that we could collect. I said, Great. Go ahead and bowled your top three to five, that would be the 20%, that moves 80%. Like, if we knew what these, you know, these 20% were, then we could use those and leverage them to move 80% of the business. That's what they did. So cool. That's what we're gonna track to start. So then we put the spreadsheet the tabs in the spreadsheets and systems in place based upon just the 20% that moves the 80% of the business. And we're starting there in some of these new systems that we're putting in place.

Andrew Biggs 26:07
Yeah, I mean, I love that. I mean, so many people underestimate just how, how detail oriented you could get with things. And what I love about that is you got detail oriented, but then you still went big picture. And it's like, what we want to do with this reporting is sometimes we want to be very like panoramic interview. And sometimes we want to like really zoom in. And just the process by which you guys were able to come up with 100 different KPIs potentially, that you could track and maybe eventually, it would be good to check all of them, right. Now, you also need to figure out what's like the one bite of the apple that we can comfortably take a bite of this quarter or this year, and kind of do it intelligently. But I think, in general, the general rule is more data, the better, right? And sometimes people actually under complicate this sometimes. And there's like, Well, all I need is this, this and this. And it's like, well, sure, if you want to get to a certain point, and just, you know, stay at making six figures a year. But if you want to get into, you know, making half a million dollars, 1,000,003 million, 5 million, 10 million, you know, and so on and so forth, then we should be thinking differently. And so inviting people into that is super important. Well, cool. I think this is some really good stuff. By the way, a couple of comments here in real time. By the way, if you're if you're listening to the recording, you can join us live every Thursday at noon, Eastern we record these and they stream live onto our Facebook group, the better than ratio. So if you want to join that group, you can always watch live and interact with us in the comments. Pressey Martinez asked, What would you look for for the product that could help automatic, real fine, automatic real time data, I dropped a tool there, basically, what you want to look for, is anything around business intelligence software, right, so I just found an article, dropped it in there for the top 12 Business Intelligence software's and just check them out, you're gonna find different price points, different licensing agreements, and different things like that around those, some of them are gonna be hundreds or 1000s of dollars, some of them might have a much lower price point to get started, maybe you're talking 25 100 bucks a month, that could revolutionize your business. So and also some some other comments here, this is great value, this is what I'm looking at right now, it's a headache to get all these things set it set up, but it's so freeing when you can get it done. So I'm really feeling really good about this, I definitely think that there are probably some other things that we could chat on. But when it comes to this, this is a pretty good high level overview of how you want to create reports. You know, the last thing I'll just kind of share there is getting access to raw data. You know, the way you want to think about this is, you know, think about like how much data like when someone says, you know how much data Facebook has on you, or how much data Jeff Bezos has on you like, what does that even mean? You know, really, what it means is, every single time there's like an interaction, it kind of is recorded as a row in an Excel spreadsheet, it's the way you want to think about that, that was actually recorded as a row in an Excel spreadsheet, not really, it's recorded as a row of information in what's called a database. Right? And so they have all these different types of databases that you know, people can use, depending on what sort of software coding languages that are that are created. But that's the way that they think right? So when you click like on the better than rich show, right, or subscribe, boom, that's a row of data that they now have on here right now is you know, maybe like that, maybe you doubt but the truth is what what's happening is it's creating a row when you click heart or like or whatever. It's saying user 1117654321 just liked this person users 24750 their comments at this time it was A video. This was their location when they did it, all of that. So when we can get to that level of granularity, like going back to the sales example, all right, how many phone calls were made today? Okay, that's great. What time were they made? Who were they made by? Who it who did they call, you know, was successful or not. And then we can look and say, Oh, wow, we're really successful when we call between eight and 10am. But from three to 5pm, we're very unsuccessful. And so you can start to make different choices about maybe when to run the meeting, and when to encourage people to the phone, because we're looking at large sets of data that are collected over, you know, periods and periods of time that can add up. And then you can actually start to make business intelligent choices around it and say, Oh, we're 67% more likely to get someone to pick up if we call, you know, before 9am Before their day starts, or whatever. So collecting that raw data is so important. And and so we need to be thinking about how do I even design a process to start capturing it the way Facebook does the way, you know, Jeff Bezos is doing it, but do it at a cost that's not going to cost you an arm and a leg.

Mike Abramowitz 31:07
And also, we attempted this when you brought this to me a couple years ago when, like clock outs, clock outs of shifts, or appointments or presentations. And we were having this and we had hundreds of points of data from all of our sales representatives clocking out of their appointments. So every single demo, we I mean, we're doing hundreds of hundreds employments. So we have all of these data points. And we would be able to look at the themes of what are what are the objections or concerns? That was one of the questions what objection or concerns like a drop down menu, what were items that they liked, but didn't buy. And then we had like a whole, you know, we had a section of that. And so we had these, and then we would take that information. And that's what we use to run our sales meetings. So we would take that, and run in instructional topics or workshops based upon the feedback that we got from collecting that data. So it was kind of a pain to shift our culture to have every single representative and salesperson like, enter this information in. But we help inform them, it's like, we're not doing this to micromanage you, we're doing this so we can help you. And if we don't see what you need help with, and we actually don't know. So by a seeing it will know and then in turn, it's going to help you increase your results, increase your productivity and and help you get closer to your goal. It was a partnership. So that way, they were really doing it seriously. And we oftentimes shared with them, all of the data, not the names, but just the the data itself. So they can say, hey, this is adding up, okay, I need to continue doing this because they're working on this behind the scenes, I think that little note right there is showing that showing your team that you are doing something with the data. So they know it's not just a pain in the neck that extra 30 or 60 seconds if you're having a user enter some of this in and it's actually being used and if it's not being used, then maybe you a question, either number one, do we really need it? Or number two is how can we begin using it and making it meaningful?

Andrew Biggs 33:08
Absolutely, absolutely. Well, this was a this was beautiful, man, I really enjoyed it. Anything else that you want to share with everybody before we send them on with our weak?

Mike Abramowitz 33:21
I don't I if you understand CVI, I'm a banker, innovator. So naturally, the numbers and the data and whatnot, is where my advantage comes into play. So if you wanted to, you know, arrange a conversation with myself or Andrew Andrews taught me how to like tap into this creative genius, I think it makes sense to, you know, hop on a discovery call with one of us and just, you know, we could pick apart your business for 30 or 40 minutes. And, and, you know, we could look at your KPIs or lack thereof, and, you know, maybe help you out. And we just recently did this for one of our new clients. And they were like, Oh, my God, there's so much I didn't know. And it's always fun to kind of just poke around a little bit. So we'd be glad to do that for you. If that's something up your alley or something you're interested in, you can make your way to better enriched calm and, you know, click the link there to to arrange a complimentary discovery conversation.

Andrew Biggs 34:15
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what, last shameless plug, we are also doing an event on all these topics coming up in Tampa here. So check that out as well, on our website, but hey, thank you so much, Mike. Appreciate your time. Thanks, everyone, for listening, and remember to leave today better than you found it. We'll see you next week. Thanks for watching. Bye.

Mike Abramowitz 34:38
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, and you'd like to help support the show, please share it with others post about it on social media or leave a rating and review. To catch all the latest from us. You can follow us on Instagram at better than underscore rich and join our Facebook group at the better than rich show. Thanks again for listening. We look forward to seeing you next time and remember leave today better than you found it

Transcribed by https://otter.ai