Data fundamentals for retail, sales, and marketing

- [Instructor] Did you know that 90 percent of the data in the world was created in the last two years alone? In fact, more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. Yet, despite this, only about one half of one percent of that data is ever analyzed, let alone applied to productive use in business. What if you could take advantage of that extraordinary and explosively growing store of untapped data in your own business? That could give you a tremendous advantage in serving your customers and excelling in your competitive environment. That's the purpose of this course To help you learn some of the most important ways that data and the methods of data science can help you make the most of your business. Let me share a few other things with you. For instance, this first number, 65 million. This is the average increase in net income from 10 percent better data use for a fortune 1000 company. Or, 60 percent. This is the increase in operating margins with the effective use of data. And then, finally, 73 percent. This is the percentage of organizations that have invested, or soon plan to, invest in big data. Now, this course isn't necessarily about big data. But that shows you there's a serious investment and desire to get this advantage that comes from data. Now, having mentioned big data, it is important to say one other thing. We're not necessarily dealing with big data. Most organizations don't deal with a very large scale. Small and medium businesses often have very limited amounts of data that they work with. But they can still get great advantage and insight from the information that's available to them. Let me give you an example of how this works. You may be familiar with the Pareto Curve. And the idea here is, you have the amount of input you make on the bottom, and the output you get out of it on the left. And it's not linear. It's not a one to one turn. And what you find with the Pareto is you get about 80 percent of your output from abut 20 percent of your input. Hence, it's better known by the 80, 20 rule. Again, you get about 80 percent of your output or 80 percent of your data effectiveness from 20 percent of your input or the work that we're able to spend. And so, it turns out, that to get effective insight from data, even very simple tools will often suffice. Simply the ability to go through a spreadsheet and see what's there can give you an advantage that some of your competitors may not have. So, specifically in terms of things you want to work with, there are spreadsheets. Put your data in the rows and the columns and explore it and see what's there. You can also make pivot tables which are a wonderful way of combining and re-arranging the data for additional insight. Simple charts like bar charts and line charts are usually enough to give you all of the insight that you need to make effective operating decisions based on data. And in terms of the statistics that you need to do, you find those tend to be very simple as well. Fundamental things like counts. Counting how many times people visit your website or how many sales you make. Or measures like the time spent on the site or the money spent. Or making simple ratios like earnings divided by expenditures. And that gives you an apples to apples comparison. And so, these are very simple concepts but they're not always applied or applied effectively within retail sales and marketing. And so, we're going to explore some of the best ways that you can apply those and some of the tools and procedures that can give you insight from your data. So, I'll finish with just a few little conclusions here. Number one, data has great potential and commerce but unfortunately that data is often lost. People don't know where it is or the information they can give you is ignored. Sometimes that's because people get intimidated and they're worried they can't do it. But the important thing to remember is that simple methods may be sufficient for getting useful and competitive information out of your data.