Unlocking commercial value from your data - key takeaways.
Summarising the insight shared in our recent blog series…
Over the past couple of months, I’ve spent a lot of time focusing on the challenges faced by businesses looking to unlock commercial value from their data, also exploring ways brands can overcome them.
In my first post, I described company data as an iceberg - with most of it hidden, inaccessible and invisible. I suggested organisations are only utilising around 20% of their data. However, while writing this series of blogs I stumbled across an article written by the ‘Harvard Business Review’ in 2017 which suggested it’s as low as 1%.
Regardless of whether it's 1% or 20%, the opportunity to improve remains huge. With such an appetite for data-driven decision making in business today, the potential for insight – and therefore improved marketing and sales performance – is left untapped.
Over the years, I’ve found that when it comes to data, businesses tend to prioritise technology. However, in this series of blogs, I’ve looked at how important people, planning and processes are to a successful data strategy.
So for my final post, I’ll round up the key points from this series – the takeaways that you can put into practice.
Developing the right culture and skills.
Establishing a data culture, and nurturing the right skills is fundamental. Here’s how you go about it…
Collaboration across departments is key.
Breaking down silos to align marketing, sales and analytics teams yields better insights and ultimately, better results.
While your analysts will have the technical knowledge to mine and interrogate data, your marketing and sales team will bring the qualitative context that is so often missing.
Co-authoring insight.
Through collaboration, a shared understanding and empathy for different perspectives will emerge.
Too often, marketing, sales and analytics teams battle against one another. It’s not uncommon for analysis produced by the insight team to travel up the chain of command to senior management – totally bypassing marketing and sales departments – to be used as a beating stick for the relevant department. This isn’t helpful.
So co-author insight, present the quantitive findings and qualitative context together to senior management, along with clear actions as to what the relevant stakeholders are going to do about it.
Developing skills.
I’m not saying everyone needs to be the next Bill Gates, but employees in marketing and sales departments need to understand the commercial value of data and how it can be applied to overcome challenges and seize opportunities. This is lacking in most organisations.
As I discussed in my recent video, the online payments solution provider, Stripe, started to break down the barriers between technical and non-technical members of staff. Stripe started running coding classes – not to develop more software engineers – but to give non-technical employees a firm understanding of the technical nature of their product.
Given the increasing importance of data, other businesses could learn from this and upskill the data competence of their workforce. Above all else, it will help them learn which questions to ask – key if they want to unlock value from their data.
Planning for a successful data strategy.
If you don’t have a plan in place for today or the future, your data strategy won’t improve. In my second post, I shared Levo’s data roadmap, which is a structured approach to building quality data.
Levo’s data roadmap.
Start by creating an understanding of the market and updating this regularly - bi-annually ideally. From here, audit your existing data against the market, identifying the gaps. Then you can diagnose where and why you have these gaps and create targeted strategies to acquire and enrich your data. Finally, with a firm grasp of your data’s potential - and its strengths and weaknesses - you’re in a position to start leveraging it to gain a commercial advantage.
Data democratisation.
In my fourth post, I focused on data democratisation. In other words, making the inaccessible, accessible – simplifying the complex. By democratising your data, non-technical employees can participate and even become integral to the process – able to offer fresh perspectives and personal experiences to the organisation’s data strategy.
Processes.
Without robust data processes and clear responsibilities, organisations run the risk of data becoming non-compliant and outdated. In my third post, I wrote about how to avoid ‘data decay’ – the gradual and expected reduction in quality of data over time.
Maintaining quality and hygiene.
If you don't keep on top of data quality, you’ll quickly find it gets away from you. Regularly auditing your data to spot issues and fix them is the easiest way to avoid this.
Data integrity issues are inevitable – up to a third of your database will become out of date over a 12 month period. Therefore, having a clearly defined playbook of processes in place to deal with these issues will make everyone's lives easier.
Driving accountability.
In large B2B sales organisations, hundreds, even thousands of people may be interacting with customer data. These individuals might work in marketing, sales, service or analytics departments.
Setting expectations and driving accountability are key. Clearly documenting and communicating responsibilities and standards – and making it part of each department's and individual’s objectives – motivates everyone to play their part and collaborate to achieve the organisation’s desired outcome.
Summary.
Data is often seen as dull and, dare I say it, boring. Used effectively, however, it will become your organisation’s most valuable asset.
When it comes to data, the basics matter most. With these in place, you should have a foundation to start extracting value from a robust data strategy.
To learn more about how Levo can help you to leverage commercial value from your data, contact us using the form below.
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