Startups are quickly becoming the lifeblood of new business in this country and around the world.  A vast array of new business ideas and ventures are being generated at a blistering pace by talented entrepreneurs.  Throughout my experience within the small and mid-size business marketplace, I've often found that startups, for a multitude of reasons, traditionally lack the analytics to really push them toward greater success.

Often, the problem is centered around two things: one, the founder doesn't feel the business has reached a threshold for needing analytic solutions or two (and often times the more mitigating factor), the business leaders doen't feel that they can afford analytics even though they realize it could answer a majority of their questions.

Let me share with you the story of one SMB customer, TrueCar, an online automotive information and communications platform designed to create a better car-buying experience for both consumers and dealers.  As its business grew, TrueCar needed a way to compile and analyze car sales data, choose the most successful web-based marketing efforts and forecast car sales – important to getting its name out to both dealers and the public. They turned to SAS.

TrueCar relies on analytics to:

• Build the most accurate new and used car pricing models and products that capture the dynamic automotive market in a near-real-time application.
• Integrate a vast array of data that comes in various formats, lives in different databases and changes/updates every day.
• Scale in terms of servers, users and automated processes to crunch, score and push data for the front-end technologies to consume.

So, SAS at a startup … yes, you read it right. If you think of SAS as the exclusive province of Fortune 1000 companies, think again.  You don’t have to be a multibillion-dollar organization to derive value from analytics. We bring the power and technology of analytics to small and midsize organizations so they can be more competitive and optimize what they’re doing with their data.

For many organizations, like TrueCar, SAS is the game changer.   A lot of reports that are driven by tools such as Microsoft Excel do a good job of telling you what happened yesterday. Companies need that view, but we also want to give our SMB customers, such as TrueCar, the ability to understand what might happen tomorrow, so they can make better and more forward-looking decisions.

If you are a startup or entreprenuer I'd love to get your take on what you feel is impeding your adoption of strategic analytical decision-making.

Read more about TrueCar's analytics experience or check out the TrueCar analytics webinar.