Best Practices Library
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Data Driven Crisis Management
It's possible to wield data as a mighty weapon to not only survive a crisis but to turn it into an opportunity. We’ll cover various methods and approaches to do just that, which you can use immediately to take back control.
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Making Remote Work
Today, there are many ways to build a company and often not all of your employees are in the same place. Remote work has gone from a radical idea to common practice. Here are some principles and tactics that will help your team make remote working an advantage that actually increases your productivity.
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Customer Acquisition Costs
Customers are not free. How much do you pay per customer? This week we look at customer acquisition cost (CAC). Breaking down CAC can help you figure out how much money your business gets from each customer.
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Market Sizing
Your total addressable market (TAM) is how big your business could theoretically become if it were to control 100% of its market – if every possible customer was a customer of your company and you had no competition.
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Data Silos
The tools we use to collect data are constantly evolving. This leads us to having lots of data in different databases. This week we talk about how to break down these data silos and aggregate all of your data in one place.
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Pricing Strategy – Part 2
Setting the right price is challenging. In part two of this two-part series we discuss more methods that will help you set prices that will help you drive revenue.
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See how Outlier can help you know the impossible with your data.
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Pricing Strategy – Part 1
How can we set prices? In part one of this two-part series we discuss methods that can help you find the right price.
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Competitive Intelligence
We all want to know what our competitors are up to. Here’s how to, legally, gather and interpret data on your competition.
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Unit Economics
Unit Economics looks at per-unit metrics. They can be hard to calculate, but can provide helpful insights on the profitability of your business.
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Metric Translation
Data can be very helpful only if you know what it is trying to tell you. Learn how to understand and translate your data so you can figure out what is going on.
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Trendlines
Now that we have gathered our data, let’s start talking about how to use it. Trendlines are a great way of using your data to gain insight into your business.
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Data Audits
It’s easy to gather data. The challenging part is trusting it. Here we talk about how to audit your data so you know that your data is trustworthy.
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Design
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Sales Metrics
Most companies make money through sales, but few use data to optimize their Sales process. Here is how to use data to make your sales process better.
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Consumer Lifetime Value
Lifetime Value (LTV) is an important metric for businesses to track. It can help you figure out whether or not you can afford to get more customers. We talk about what LTV means, how to find it, and what it means to your business.
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Choosing KPI Metrics
Key Performance Indicators are the most important metrics you track. Choosing them well is critical to ensuring your business achieves its goals.
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Building a Culture of Data
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Task Prioritization
Your productivity is a direct result of how effectively you prioritize all the tasks you need to complete. Data can be an essential tool in doing this well.
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Selecting Analytics Tools
The choice of your analytics tools is a critical step in building your ability to use data to make decisions. Here is what to look for, what to avoid and how to make your choices a success.
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Data Insights
Knowing what to look for is often the difference between success and failure when it comes to data exploration. Here are some common types of insights and how to find them.
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Data Exploration
Exploring your data can be time consuming and ultimately unsuccessful. Here are some best practices to ensure your data explorations produce real results.
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Data Storytelling
Some of the worst business decisions in history were data driven! How you communicate what the data tells you is important too.
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Recommendation Systems
If you have purchased anything online in the past 15 years, you have been exposed to a recommendation system.
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Growth Rate
How fast is your business growing? It can be harder to answer than it might seem.
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Churn
A sad fact of business is that you cannot retain a customer forever.
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Metric Component Analysis
Can you list what the primary drivers were of your total revenue, revenue growth and gross margins?
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Root Cause Analysis
How to quickly identify the root cause of problems in your business.
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Ad Campaign Optimization
Get the most of your advertising spend by optimizing your campaign performance.
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Combinatorics
Understand permutations, combinations and how they affect your options.
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Clustering
Clustering helps find hidden patterns in your data by grouping similar things for you, such as customer personas.
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Customer Personas
Customer personas help you understand your customers by identifying common traits and behaviors.
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Game Theory
Game Theory is a mathematical discipline which helps you understand how others may respond to your decisions.
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Decision Theory
Decision Theory is a framework for structuring your decision making process and allowing you to measure it.
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Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning is a useful tool when you need to make decisions in an uncertain and changing environment where the future is hard to predict.
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Impact Analysis
Impact Analysis is a way to estimate the impact your decisions will have on the business and hence evaluate your options.
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Data Driven Planning
Data Driven Planning is a method of using data to build better long term business plans.
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Dirty Data
Not all data is clean and easy to use, often your data is dirty and you need to figure out how to clean it.
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Seasonality
Many aspects of your business will change with the seasons, and the better you can understand those changes the better you will be able to predict the future.
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Productivity
Measuring and evaluating your productivity can greatly improve your overall business performance.
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Funnels
Many aspects of your business will change with the seasons, and the better you can understand those changes the better you will be able to predict the future.
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Text Analysis
Text-based, open-ended questions are very difficult to analyze and glean insights at scale.
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Survey Design
If you want to know what your customers are thinking, you need to ask them!
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A/B Testing
Even when you have a wealth of data it can be challenging to make a difficult decision when you have a number of different options to choose between.
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Setting Goals
Being data driven is much more than just understanding how you’ve performed in the past, it is about improving in the future!
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Money Metrics
Are there more financial metrics you should be using to make decisions? The answer is absolutely!
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Advanced KPIs
More complex metrics that are specific to your business can be dangerous because they are specialized and complex.
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Margin Metrics
You are in business to make money! So am I, actually, so we have something in common. But what does it mean to “make money”?
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Data Analysis Tools
There are a number of data analytics tools available to compute simple statistics and visualize your data.
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Data Visualization
Data visualization is complementary to data analysis – it allows you to condense large data sets into a single picture (or set of pictures).
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Simple Statistics
A few of the most common descriptive statistics used to understand data and predictive modeling using a linear regression.
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Predicting the Future
Predicting the future is hard. I am fairly certain of this because I’ve never won the Powerball and neither have you.
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Customer Segmentation
Segmentation, in its simplest form, breaks through the illusion that all of your customers are equal.
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Happy Customers
What makes a happy customer? What is the deciding factor between happy customers and lost customers?
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Numbers Lie
Numbers can lie to you. Some of the most data driven organizations in the world make the biggest mistakes.
