INSIGHTS
The Silent Killer
The silent killer costing companies up to 30% in lost revenue every year. With a looming economic downturn on the horizon, CEOs face increased pressure on growth and cost reviews as revenue opportunities quickly decline.
With a more challenging fundraising environment, liquidity management is paramount. While 18-24 months of runway is appropriate in normal times, a more challenging environment calls for enough cash to run the company for at least two years, if not three.
More Data, Less Insights
Amidst an economic downturn, time is our most valuable resource, and data drains it. There are roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated every day, more data is now generated in one day than in the previous century. However, the cost of frequent data generation is often accompanied by data silos (data stored in isolated sources) and, in turn, the need to eliminate them. This data is restricted, unanalysed, and only available to a single department or unit within an organisation.
With this comes an ever increasing challenge for CEOs to access insights that drive their organisations forward – the ability for companies to make sense of big data diminishes, confounding rather than illuminating strategic decisions. Often by the time CEOs receive reports, the data includes lagging indicators of what is actually going on in the business, leaving no time to react to revenue opportunities and impending threats.
There is no denying that real-time insights help companies uncover untapped revenue and find new business opportunities. According to a 2020 Forrester survey of 900 global business leaders, data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat their revenue goals than non-data-driven companies.
But nearly half of surveyed companies said they fail to routinely use data to guide business decisions as a result of limited access to timely, meaningful data. The reason for this limited access? Data Silos.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong With Big Data
In 2017, the American Management Association found that 83% of executives confirmed that their organizations have silos, with 97% finding them harmful to their organizations. More recently, Adobe surveyed more than 1,000 IT Decision Makers and found that over 37% of respondents cited data silos as the top challenge facing IT teams in creating a single view of the customer.
Data silos are a costly issue. They lead to multiple versions of the truth and drain company resources, productivity and, revenue. According to Gartner, businesses are set to incur, on average, $15M per year in costs due to poor quality data. An international survey of more than 2,000 business leaders by Boston Consulting Group found that 45% said revenue leakage is a systemic problem facing their companies while IDC Market Research also states that companies can lose up to 30% in revenue annually due to inefficiencies resulting from incorrect or siloed data.
With a looming economic downturn on the horizon, there is an increased focus on growth and cost reviews as revenue opportunities quickly decline. In recent weeks Microsoft, Tesla, Uber and Netflix have announced hiring freezes, while leading venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator have issued stark warnings to business leaders telling them to brace for a serious market downturn, a glimpse of things to come for the SME sector in the months ahead.
The unforeseeable is the enemy of growth. Now is the time for CEOs to develop internal processes and strategies that leverage the power of technology to garner insights from their data. To confidently navigate uncertain market conditions it is imperative that CEOs stop hunting down unstructured data and instead place themselves in a position where powerful insights are being served up. By making no surprises the new normal, company leaders will have time to course correct as they expose potential threats and opportunities well in advance.
CUSTOMER STORY
How Planr transformed Calligo's revenue performance
Planr is enabling Calligo to grow predictably, to optimise sales and marketing capacity and to deliver revenue and sales assurance, profitability and cash flow.
