Sales Teams Need Data, Not Reports
Connecting Customer Data, part 1 of 4
This is the final entry in my Connecting Customer Data to Decisions series. Find the previous articles here:
3 - Help Salespeople Explore Data
4 - How to Measure Customer Value
It’s hard to think of any place where a good data strategy makes a bigger difference for a company than customer data. Every company needs help breaking down their customers into meaningful categories that help their sales and marketing teams make better everyday decisions.
But data teams get this wrong all the time. Their reporting solutions give people all kinds of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), showing customer totals in many different slices. They try too hard; metrics are not data. Sales and marketing people already know what it takes to find new opportunities and make the business more profitable, but metrics won't help them see what they need to do to improve results. Is there a better way?
Yes. Give people data, not reports.
Data, Not Reports
Here's a simple example: recurring revenue. The best kind of customer buys consistently from you, every week or month.
On average, my non-profit organization Common Ground receives about $19,000 in donations each month. But if I look at the list of people who set up recurring donations from their credit card or bank account, it only adds up to $10,000. Seeing the details of this data helps me take real action; I can tell who hasn’t registered as a recurring donor. Maybe their credit card expired, or maybe they didn't know they could help our cause more by setting up an automatic gift. The top-level metric might say I've got $19,000 of monthly contributions, but the data helps me take action to grow our donor base and improve the consistency of their support.
We’ve made a huge commitment to mentoring kids in our community, and the data helps me find people I can remind of our mission.
Instead of creating a report that estimates recurring revenue, give people all the revenue history and all contracted orders, like subscriptions or (in my example) scheduled donations. By comparing these two data sets, sales and marketing people can find more ways to convert revenue into recurring business.
Capture Decisions
That's a straightforward example of giving people data instead of metrics. Most situations are more complicated, however, and require work on the structure of your data. Data teams often fail to align master data with how business teams think about their customers.
In this new series, I'll show you how to shape your customer data to align with what sales and marketing teams expect to see. I'll focus on two basic types of customer data: parent customers and customer segments.
Parent-customer relationships help you fill in missing competitive information about your customers. I’ll show you how to use master data to capture strategic decisions about how marketing teams service each customer and help you identify the business processes you need to make this solution effective.
Then, you can use transaction data to see opportunities for growing the business and making it more profitable.
This solution helps sales and marketing teams answer some of their most important questions, like, “How significant is the customer in the market? How important is the customer to my company? How should my company sell to this customer?” Sales and marketing people always ask these questions, and my only goal is to help you form the data in the best way possible to help them find answers.
Maybe you've noticed the irony in what I'm telling you. Management experts often say that companies should align their decisions with the data. I’m telling you the opposite: IT teams should align the data with people's decisions. Shape your customer data to align with the decisions people already know they should make.
Stop giving people metrics. Give them better data instead.