Remember the first time you touched a hot stove?
A message traveled from your hand to your brain that said “Big mistake, kid!” You probably jerked back, screamed at the top of your lungs and swore to never, ever do that again.
That’s the nervous system at work.
The nervous system serves as a connection between your body and the outside world, using your senses to help you avoid danger (like a hot stove). It also helps regulate the body’s other systems — more on that in a second.
Well, guess what: your business has a nervous system too! And it serves a similar purpose of keeping your company healthy.
So in this post, I want to tell you:
- How the Business Nervous System keeps your company healthy and growing
- The different tools and software involved in the nervous system “tech stack”
- A simple tool help you create the perfect Business Nervous System for your brand
What is the Business Nervous System?
See, the body is made up of a ton of overlapping systems — you know, like the digestive system, the immune system, the vascular system, etc.
Similarly, your business is also made up of a collection of systems, each one serving a useful function that’s important to the whole.
These business systems include:
- Customer service
- Human resources
- Inventory management
- Different ecommerce tools
- Marketing
- Project management, etc.
However, these departments are also managed by different people, with different goals, who are using different metrics to measure success.
So the question becomes — how do you ensure that these systems are all communicating with each other, and that each one is serving the larger goal of keeping the business healthy?
With accurate reporting, of course.
After all, if the product team doesn’t communicate that an item is out of stock, and the marketing team spends $50,000 running ads to an offer that isn’t available, that’s a big problem for the business.
Or if customers are writing in to support but no one is managing tickets or monitoring outcomes, that’s a big problem for the business.
Well, this collection of reporting tools you use across your business? That’s what I like to call your Business Nervous System.
Like the real thing, the Business Nervous System also takes in external data (from tools and platforms) and internal data (from other systems) to help you do what’s best for the body (your business).
Why Your Website Should Be the Center of Your Business Nervous System
The problem is that each of these systems has its own reporting.
That makes the data hard to keep track of, since important information is tucked away in different departments of the business, where it’s often forgotten about and not put to good use.
Some of this data can also be inaccurate.
When it comes to attribution, for example, every paid ad platform — whether it be Meta, Google, TikTok, or whatever — wants to make itself look good. They want to take credit for the conversion, even if that doesn’t paint the full picture.
That’s why we need a central hub where we can go for reporting that is both unified and accurate.
And that hub is your website. The website is a unified source of truth for a many different systems in your business.
There are 3 reasons for this:
- It’s the most honest: Unlike traffic platforms that are competing for your business, your website isn’t trying to make itself look good. It’s simply giving you accurate data on what it sees.
- It covers the entire customer journey: From awareness, to engagement, to conversion, your website shows you how your audience is interacting with your brand over their customer lifetime.
- It’s owned. Right now, we’re dealing with a major loss of data across several key platforms. But your website gives you data that you (mostly) control and no one can take away from you.
That’s why the website should be the center of your Business Nervous System, so you can get the most accurate data and the most substantial amount of data possible.
Building Out the Right Tech Stack for Your Business Nervous System
To get the most accurate reporting from your website, you need a variety of methods for collecting and analyzing data.
The collection of tools you use to do this is called your tech stack.
In a second, we’ll help you decide on the exact tools you need for your specific business. But first, I want to cover the most important types of data collection.
Those are:
- Web Analytics: Helps you see where your traffic comes from and how people interact with your site.
- Heat Maps: Shows where users click or scroll the most, so you can make better content and design choices, and know when something breaks.
- Session Recordings: Lets you watch how users navigate your site, making it easier to spot UX issues.
- Split Testing: Tells you which version of a page produces better results.
- Qualitative Feedback: Gives you real insights from real users that you might not get elsewhere.
- Tag Management: Makes it simple to track data without always messing with code.
These methods help you collect and analyze data on your website so you can judge the outputs of your other system, and make the most informed business decisions possible.
But depending on the size and complexity of your business, you might not need to implement all of them.
So how do you decide on the tech stack that’s right for you?
(Quiz) Choose the Perfect Tech Stack for Your Business Nervous System
The truth is, you don’t want to pay for unnecessary software or go through the trouble of collecting data that might not be useful to your business right now.
So we came up with a simple tool to help you choose the right tech stack for you.
First, ask yourself the following 4 questions. In the given fields, enter “1” for no and “3” for yes:
- Does your business have more than 100 skews?
- Do you have more than 500 web pages?
- Is your annual business revenue 8+ figures?
- Do you spend more than 10 hours/week looking at Google Analytics?
Your points will be totalled automatically, and your recommended tech stack will populate at the bottom.
(Note that the each tool on the right is linked, so you can click right over to their site and get started.)
4–6 Points
At 4–6 points, you’re probably not a huge business and you can likely succeed without hyper-advanced reporting.
Matomo and Crazy Egg should cover all your bases.
7–9 Points
For larger businesses, you can still succeed with the standard reporting tools.
But consider adding stronger split-testing software like Convert to give you more control over what you can test and how many tests you can run.
10+ Points
If you’re an 8–10-figure brand, then you want the absolute best reporting possible.
For web analytics, you probably want a tool like Adobe Analytics for more advanced features and scalability that’s tailored to a complex, high-traffic company.
You might also want to add tools like:
- Quantum Metrics for heatmaps and session recordings
- Qualtrics for qualitative surveys
- And Adobe Target for even more advanced split-testing
(Note: If you like the software you’re currently using, you don’t need to change tools. Just fill in the gaps with additional tools to add the functionality you’re missing.)
* * * * *
Alright, I hope you enjoyed this post.
With a more fleshed out Business Nervous System, you’ll be able to get accurate reporting from all your different departments so you can keep your company healthy and make better, more informed decisions.
Thanks for reading!
