Thinking Outloud
The Commons of Sense
“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”
John Wilder Tukey, mathematician and statistician; developer of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and the box plot
Most business leaders will admit they can never leverage enough data.
Yet every day they are fire-hosed with priorities around revenue generation, sales team enablement, customer-client fulfillment, and operations throughput.
There is a plethora of bytes available on everything.
Customer and prospect behavior, competitor patterns, operations gaps, missing links to customer connection, ROI guidance on marketing investments, and CRM inadequacies affecting closing rates. To name a few!
Data doesn’t live in a vacuum. Metrics are usually dependent on each other. Companies may deploy a hundred different free reporting tools.
Analytics might be concerning because it draws attention to a lack of having the right tools, metrics, and applications. Time is limited, resources are tight, and there’s not enough internal knowledge to draw from.
It starts by realizing that there’s too much data available in the first place.
Teams shovel data from internal and external sources into their funnel without much forethought for data governance considerations.
Additionally, internal teams can get trapped in looking at the wrong metrics.
For example, with marketing and sales ‘vanity’ metrics you get a limited story. Whether from Facebook Likes, Instagram follower counts, or LinkedIn re-posts.
Vanity metrics could even define certain revenue streams or performance indicators that don’t add up or produce losses when correlated to spend amounts.
Acquiring clarity and visibility on the potential of full data utilization is a challenge.
Especially when you don’t know what you’re missing.
To master the hidden assets in underutilized data you need expert input from the front end, at the beginning.
You need to understand the structure of your various data sets, your business model and processes, how the data will take form with in-market touchpoints to customers, and the role each data set needs to play in optimizing business operations.