Why companies need to look beyond the numbers

Fast Company
Reid Carr

Businesses thrive on achieving and exceeding numbers. I’d be lying if my company, Red Door Interactive, didn’t pay close attention to analytics because after all, we would be out of business if we didn’t deliver results. While spreadsheets can be an essential tool for any organization, focusing solely on the raw data can restrict a company from reaching its full potential. Having a clear strategy for not only measuring results, but then understanding what it all means and knowing what to do with information is another part of the equation that is often times overlooked.

As for me, I don’t stop as simply getting the data, but asking myself and my management team three questions when they’re presented:

What were the goals?
Achievements are based on more than just figures. For example, a company may be proud of the number of Web site visits during a specific time period, but was the goal to attract new visitors or was it to increase sales? Most likely the goal was to drive more revenues and while raising the number of online visitors is great, the ultimate objective was overlooked if that’s all that resulted from an initiative.

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