With many companies struggling to make sense of their data, the idea of having a data-driven culture is certainly attractive. But the reality is that very few businesses have been successful at using data to create value and drive actions. 

With platforms to help track products, sales, and customers, companies are exposed to an enormous amount of information, making it hard for them to drown out the noise and 

understand the actions that are driving business results. 

Turning data into actionable insights requires a certain level of expertise as you need to understand the essence of what makes your data valuable. 

Let’s start from the beginning for clarity. What is data, really? 

Data is the raw unprocessed facts, that are usually represented as a number and can be found in spreadsheets or databases. Combining data with chart visualizations allows you to provide more context and extract information in a more user-friendly way. 

By analyzing this information you are able to generate insights, answer questions, and create conclusions about your performance. The insights that don’t just answer questions, but can also drive actions are actionable insights. 

Learning how to maximize your actionable insights is the key to having a successful data-driven culture. In this post, we will outline how we turn data into actionable insights using our reporting tool. 

Centralize Your Data

When you are working with multiple platforms, it can be hard to make sense of your data. Logging into dozens of different tools to cross-compare results can be very time-consuming and makes it difficult to draw correlations between your efforts and your results. 

You may choose to use Google Sheets or Excel to get all of your data in one place, but consider the difficulty of automating this process in order to get up-to-date metrics. So, choosing an analytics tool is an essential step in making your data more actionable. 

How We Do This:

At Consciously, we use Databox vs Google Data Studio to manage and report on our client’s data from one centralized place. We can easily connect all of your platforms through one-click integrations to quickly organize, monitor, and report on our results. Having all of our data in one tool allows us to get a birds-eye view of our client’s performance, across all their platforms. 

Determine Measurable Business Results 

Your metrics and KPIs should be linked to your business goals and initiatives. This will ensure that you can use your data to easily identify trends and convert them into strategic decisions. In order to determine the metrics you should track, you can split them into a few different categories: output, outcome, quality, and quantity. 

• Output metrics help you measure your activities. They can be used as a direct measurement of the work you are doing on a daily basis.  

• Outcome metrics are used to measure the impact of your output. Outcome metrics can be further broken down into leading outcomes and lagging outcomes. Leading outcomes show the immediate impact of your outputs while lagging outcomes measure the delayed impact of your efforts. 

• Quality metrics will help you showcase the caliber of the outcomes generated. 
• Quantity metrics will measure the total number of outcomes generated as a result of your outputs. 

Categorizing your metrics will help you understand the different ‘levers’ that you can pull to improve your performance. 

How We Do This:

To help us generate value from our data, we first start by defining our goals. By creating a Goal, we are able to set targets against any metric, allowing us to monitor the progress toward reaching our client’s business objectives. 

With the Metrics Screen, we can then add our KPIs to one screen. This enables us to do a quick scan to see how each metric is performing and allows us to further verify the data against our goals.

Identify Your Audience

In order to generate actionable insights, you need to consider who the data is for. What one person might see as an insight, another person may consider as noise. With this in mind, the data will only be actionable if it is delivered to the person that has a deep understanding of the objectives and can act on the data. 

As an example, a dashboard that you present to your stakeholders will look very different from a dashboard prepared for your sales team to track daily performance and targets. 

To help you better define your audience, think about answering the following questions: 

• Who are you trying to help? (c-suite, stakeholders, managers, sales representatives, etc)
• What do they do on a daily basis?
• What decisions can they make based on the data?
• How familiar are they with these metrics?
• How much context do they have on previous performance? 

How We Do This:

In order to give our data more purpose, we use Tags to help us organize the metrics and goals in our Account. As an example, we can add Tags to multiple metrics in order to highlight the audience, team member, or strategy the metric belongs to. 

These tagged metrics will then act as the building blocks of our dashboards and will ensure that we are only including the metrics that are relevant to the person that will be consuming the data.

Visualize Your Results

In a this study, 83% of the participants highlighted how data visualizations are very important when reporting on results. This should not come as much of a surprise as a lot of us need to see information in order to retain it. 

That is why combining data with graphs and charts is a great way to help people understand performance. Not only does it help you highlight patterns and draw correlations, but it also allows you to tell a very compelling story. 

Selecting how you want to visualize your results also means matching the data with the right visualization. As an example, a pie chart is a great visualization to use when you are looking to categorize your data into different groups, but it won’t give you much information on your performance over time. 

Here are a couple of things to consider when you are deciding how to visualize your results: 

• Simplicity: Don’t overcomplicate your dashboards by including too many charts and graphs. To make your data actionable, you need to focus on the graphs that will be the most impactful. Additionally, keeping your data visualizations simple will help get your point across. 
• Comparisons: Charts serve a purpose and should be used to help easily spot trends, highlight patterns, and draw conclusions. You want to make sure your data is easy to compare and analyze against time and other metrics. 

How We Do This:

Our tool facilitates our ability to create custom dashboards through Datablocks. Datablocks combine a metric with the right visualization type, creating a pre-built graph that we can easily drag and drop into our dashboard. Once a Datablock is added to the dashboard, we can further customize the chart to include custom date ranges, comparison values, trend lines, and more. 

We can also drag and drop blank visualization types into our dashboards and configure them from scratch. In the editor, we can then select the specific metric we want to use for the visualization by filtering the metrics list by the Favorites. Favorite Metrics are metrics for which we added a ‘star’ in the metrics screen.

Generate Actionable Insights From Dashboard Storytelling 

Companies that want to be data-driven need to understand how to use data to justify actions through storytelling.  

Dashboard storytelling is the process of creating a narrative around KPIs in order to illustrate business performance and influence the audience through strong data visualizations. By creating dashboards to present your data in an easy-to-understand format, you are able to easily engage your audience and drive action. 

Being good at storytelling is all about creating a structure. A good structure includes a logical flow of events and establishes clarity around your data. 

Here is how you can structure your data in order to tell a more compelling story:

1. Overview: Start by setting your agenda and addressing what you will cover. You can choose to include things like your targets, main insights, and main conclusions. 
2. Context: Next, you should provide some background information about why your findings are important. This usually means answering the who, what, why, where, and when. 
3. Discussions: At this stage, you want to create a conversation around your data by digging deeper into the details of your results. You can focus on highlighting things like your primary goals (actual value vs goal value), key challenges, and the actions you have taken that have helped you optimize your results. 
4. Conclusion: Lastly, you want to summarize the areas of improvement and highlight what you can do to move the needle in the right direction. 

Structuring your data will help build your story around key points to ensure you focus on what is important. 

How We Do This:

When presenting our results to clients, we create dashboard loops. This allows us to group multiple dashboards together in order to tell a more comprehensive story with our data. 

Spreading the data across multiple dashboards makes it easier for our clients to digest the insights, while also digging deeper into the different levels of detail. Dashboard loops have also helped us better define how we structure our data and how we present it to our clients.

Drive Action Through Meaningful Stories 

Using dashboards to tell stories about your performance is the best way to highlight your results in a way that drives action. But, before you can do this, you need to focus on the basics: identifying the metrics that will help you measure your progress, determining the audience that will be consuming your data, and combining your data with the right visualization types. 

Only then will you be able to identify the ways in which you can structure your data to extract value and drive action. Determining the structure of your data and presentation will be the key to unlocking a story that makes your data interactive and relatable, and ultimately engage your audience enough to take action.