There’s a famous line from the 1932 film, The Western Code, that goes:

“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us and I’m going to give you 24 hours to get out!”

At final showdown, the bad guy reaches for his gun but the Sheriff gets the drop on him before he can fire a shot.

Like the bad guy in an old Western, incomplete (bad) traffic data can cast a dark shadow over every opportunity to grow your business. This is typically due to an inadequate approach to collecting, measuring and comparing essential information.

With the bad data out of the picture, possibility creates openness and a culture of fairness that inspires your team to reach higher and encourages them to keep improving.

In the classic tale this is how the story begins:

All is well, but there is trouble riding into town. The townsfolk don’t even see it coming, and when trouble arrives they don’t know what to do.

Is this like your business?

According to a recent report by Smith Leonard, “year-to-date, new furniture orders fell to 3% lower than the same period in 2018 with 70% reporting lower orders year to date.”

This is the kind of market movement that can be the beginning of a dark cloud over any business and, like the townsfolk in our film, there’s nothing your people can do to control it.

But what you can control is the little things, the small wins sometimes hidden far from sight and hard to reach.

I’m talking about the insights hidden within a comparison of your salespeople’s average conversion rate, a sudden drop in average tickets, daily traffic counts and more.

And, even if you have good data and all the latest tools, it is easy to lose your edge and fail to implement best practices over time.

It happens to all of us…

There are just those times where opportunity escapes our grasp and can lead to a mindset of limitations, mediocrity, even cynicism or worse.

Blind spots and illusions about the data play tricks on our brain and make us see things not as they are. This is because our brains are hardwired to maintain the status quo and will go to great lengths to avoid change that might come from seeing things differently.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become an essential part of helping to solve many challenging problems in data management and will continue to play a bigger role in the future.

But maybe all you need is a fresh perspective—a way to see things in a new light.

This is where our Quarterly Benchmark Series could help. Because maybe what you need is an easy way to compare your business to your peers and know what you can do to improve. Being in business today means it is totally possible to see clearly and add value with fewer tools and a smaller investment than ever before. The possibility is your traffic data becomes so integral to your business, that every detail gives you the instant feedback you need to stay fully connected to what is happening the moment it happens.

Now there is no place where bad information about your foot-traffic can hide from the long arm of real-time business intelligence.

So, like the sheriff in a Western that saves the day, you can save your business from the negative effects of incomplete data, so your company can reach its full potential and grow faster than ever.