Different people across companies need to make decisions every day, and there is no decision that’s too small or insignificant.

Top 10 Tools and Tips for a Better Decision-Making Process for Leaders

The decision-making process is present every step of the way, and people in high positions need to make mundane and everyday decisions as well as long-term ones.

This can become overwhelming and sometimes people put too much pressure on themselves, as one wrong decision can cause a lot of problems down the line.

This is why you should use some proven tools and tips that improve the decision-making process and make everything much simpler.

Business Intelligence Tool

If you want to achieve the best possible results, you need to find ways to identify your company’s technology needs. When it comes to decision-making, there is one tool that absolutely every business needs, and this is a business intelligence tool.

More and more companies are starting to see the benefits BI has for business and the global business intelligence market is predicted to reach $33.3 billion by 2025.

Nowadays, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are using a BI tool to help them in the decision-making process for multiple departments.

Business intelligence is also known as computational decision-making, and when companies use a BI tool, they can collect and store different types of data.

This data can later be used in a strategic manner and give your company a competitive advantage over competitors who still haven’t started using BI.

BI tools greatly improve the decision-making process because they are able to analyze a large amount of data at the same time and generate multiple reports.

You will be able to increase your decision-making team’s effectiveness, responsiveness, and productivity.

With this tool, you can enable the centralization of information that your business extensively uses and reduce the number of different versions a document has.

This way, you will be able to have a single version of a document, be sure it’s accurate, and greatly reduce inconsistencies.

As for which tool you can use, most businesses agree that ZoomInfo is one of the best BI tools out there. However, its prices are not affordable to everyone, so you should consider ZoomInfo alternatives.

These less popular but still reliable tools can give you the same results but come at a lower price.

ETL Software

Most businesses today collect data from multiple sources, and that data is an essential part of the decision-making process. As it’s almost impossible to manually extract and process such a high volume of data, you need to use a tool that is more than capable of handling big data.

Nowadays, big data is utilized by every industry. But unfortunately, an estimated 80% of data businesses collect consists of unstructured and semi-structured data which isn’t easy to use and utilize.

If you want to have fast access to integrated and transformed data, regardless of where it came from or what volume it is, you need to use an ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool.

These tools process data at the same time as they’re transforming and loading it, so the data you receive will be ready to use.

When you use ETL software, different teams within your company will be able to get all the information they need to improve their job performance and decision-making process. ETL tools provide a wide array of sources and are mostly used for advanced analytics.

Here are just some of the ways you can use an ETL tool in your business:

• Customer support teams can look at which trends appear in support tickets and analyze the text of their conversations with customers to see where they can improve onboarding.
• Marketing teams can get better visibility into the performance of their advertising campaigns and how much ROI their efforts are bringing in.
• Product and engineering teams can analyze bug reports and productivity metrics that will allow them to prioritize their resources.

Know all the steps in the decision-making

For most people, the decision-making process consists of anywhere between five and seven steps.

While different sources claim the steps are different, they all follow a very similar format and get you to the same results.

If you follow all of the important steps, you can be sure that you’ll arrive at the right decision:

• Identify the goal you’re trying to achieve. This step isn’t important for personal goals, but you need to be sure of what you want for any business goal. And remember that the more stakeholders your business has, the more misaligned your goals will be.
• Collect all relevant information. Every decision you make needs to be well-thought-out and based on all the information you possess. This process requires you to identify the courses of action you need to take as well as all the possible alternatives.
• Evaluate your options. Take all of the information you learned in the previous step, weigh all the evidence, and see if the decision you have on your mind is the best possible option.
• Make a choice. At this stage, you already know what you want and have decided what the best way to achieve your goals is, so you can be certain your choice will be a good one.
• Evaluate the choice. Create short-term and long-term evaluations of the choice you made to see how it will impact your company.

Use the most common techniques

While you’re going through your five steps of decision-making, you will probably notice that they’re not as easy as they seem, especially the second and third steps, which are the most important ones.

That’s why smart decision-makers use the following techniques to make the process easier:

• Decision matrix. This is a series of values that are presented in rows and columns that allow you to compare all of your solutions and weigh their variables based on how important they are.
• T-chart. If you want to weigh all the positives and negatives of your options, you can create a T-chart. You’ve probably used this method before, and it’s better known as a pros and cons list.
• Pareto analysis. This technique, also known as the 80/20 rule, is great when you need to make multiple decisions, as it allows you to see which one has the highest priority. This technique is based on the idea that when you do 20% of the work, you can get 80% of the result.
• Cost-benefit analysis. No matter what decision you wind up making, there are going to be some financial ramifications. That’s why it’s also good to see how much each decision will impact your business monetarily.
• Decision tree. For this technique, you need to create a model or graph which you will use to contemplate each different option you have as well as their outcomes. You will also need to conduct statistical analysis for this technique to be successful.

Final thoughts

We make decisions on an everyday basis, and while small personal decisions you make probably won’t have a big influence on your life, big business decisions certainly will. You’ve probably wondered so many times if the choice you made was the right one.

Luckily, you won’t need to worry about that anymore, since you now know all the best tips and tools that allow for a better decision-making process.

Just remember everything you read about here and you can be sure that every choice you make from now on is the right one