Whether boosting marketing return on investment (ROI) or improving customer satisfaction, business intelligence (BI) can give small businesses and startups a distinct advantage over their competitors. It can provide them with actionable insights from their data – all presented in an easily digestible and insightful way, meaning implementation for staff is easy.

Here are the top five advantages every entrepreneur needs to know:

1. BI provides a single, real-time view of data: Many SMBs operate various databases that capture data (such as sales, marketing and finance) and they have multiple social media channels to engage with their customers. BI is therefore critical for gaining an instant, real-time view of operations to map performance, identify trends and predict future opportunities or the need to change priorities.

2. BI enables customisation: BI provides a holistic view of current performance with the ability to drill down into any chosen area of the business and the flexibility to allow for customisation. This means the MD of a small company, or team leaders in a medium firm, can decide on the KPIs most relevant to their specific areas of work rather than being overloaded with irrelevant data.

3. BI gives you the ability to highlight workload priorities: BI can clearly show bottom line revenue for SMBs in a digestible format. This gives staff an objective method to improve their performance and work smarter as it provides the ability to drill down into specific stages in the job pipeline and prioritise workload based on how close activities are to completion.

4. BI provides insight into your organisation’s talent pipeline: People are an organisation’s most valuable asset and BI enables an organisation’s staff to work smarter. For example, the HR Manager can quickly and easily understand the candidate pipeline, monitor candidate throughput, conversion and fill rates and identify the proportion of active to inactive candidates to uncover additional revenue opportunities fast.

5. BI analyses performance to increase motivation: Employee motivation is critical to sustaining revenue growth – especially in a small organisation as high staff turnover can make a negative impact quickly. By delivering an instant and complete picture of team performance, managers can investigate an individual’s performance by dynamically evaluating their activities and drilling down into the detail to identify where to focus attention for improved results. When a best performer has a good quarter, BI enable colleagues to see what activity lies behind the win, creating a competitive environment. They can increase collaboration and knowledge too.