Many marketing leadership teams are still mired in a time-consuming world of siloed spreadsheets, where individual business units record their triumphs and failures with little awareness of what’s happening beyond their individual niches. My company used to operate this way until we found the right combination of methods and technologies that led to a better way of working around data. The result has led to more insight for teams across the business around the impact of their decisions, as well a shared awareness of what’s going on within the company as a whole.
1. Map out your strategy and values
I started by working with our team to develop a framework for planning how marketing would operate as part of a ‘data-driven’ company. This framework involved creating strategy maps that showed the company’s strategy as well as associated key performance indicators (KPIs).
Based on these maps and KPIs, we developed dashboards that would show exactly what’s going on across the business. The first dashboard showed information of relevance to each department in the company so all the stakeholders across sales, finance and marketing could immediately grasp the potential value of the system. This then led to conversations around how they might formulate and append their own department specific KPIs.
The development team would then use this to hook up the most appropriate data sources and create the required dashboard and reports. Over time, this can expand as more internal and external data sources are created or used.
2. Secure commitment and demonstrate value fast
The journey to becoming a ‘data-driven company’ will require change. However, the bottom line for any project like this is that commitment to change has to involve every corner of the organisation. In my case, the marketing team had to secure enthusiastic buy-in from all the stakeholders in order to make this change around working with data.
The best way to achieve this is to deliver valuable results from the start. Now, you may think this use of data to produce quantifiable results should make the benefits obvious, but this is not the case. Even when quick wins can be created, these still have to be sold back to the organisation.
We introduced bi-weekly gatherings of stakeholders where we can demonstrate new capabilities and seek their feedback on past developments and future needs when it comes to data. By taking an agile approach to developing the IT systems, we could also iterate faster within the marketing team as well.
3. Build trust in the data
For any marketing data system to work, the information presented to users has to be trustworthy. To start with, we took information from four sources:
- Google Analytics to show online traffic
- Our CRM system for lead and opportunity details
- SAP for customer information
- ClickTools for customer satisfaction surveys.
Once we had our initial results and dashboards complete, we could add more sources of data into the mix, such as Marketo’s marketing automation system. Taken together, these applications provide data that tracks the wider customer journey for marketing.
On the face of it, effectively combining such a complex mix of systems is a massive challenge. To overcome this, we used a business intelligence and analytics platform called Birst to connect all the individual data sources. Taking this approach meant we could create a single and trustworthy view of the combined information.
As you might expect, sometimes there are questions on how accurate the data is. We use a daily log of all activity to check for anomalies and we also evaluate results to check that what’s coming through matches our expectations. The important thing is that all the data cross-refers completely and accurately, so everyone can look at the same data when it comes to making decisions, rather than everyone having their own spreadsheet or report to work with.
Over time, other applications used by teams such as sales or finance can have their data added to this mix of data. This helps marketing link to specific sales booked with customers, as well as providing harder ROI figures for campaigns. At the same time, we can extend new dashboards to those teams for them to use as well.
4. Get this right for other teams
As a marketing team, our data supports our plans and justifies our investments. However, it’s possible to provide the same data and analytics services to other teams across the business as well. However, this can be a long process, particularly when other business units may not be used to using data for decision-making.
To start this process, it’s important to know how much experience the main stakeholders within other business teams have with data. Based on this discussion, you can then understand what level to pitch this at during the initial set-up, as well as working on any education elements that they might need.
Following this, you can look at what visual information would be required in a new dashboard for the stakeholder’s business unit. In our preparation phase, questions like “What information would be the most beneficial for you? What if you could know when a certain threshold has been exceeded?” can be used to ensure the right information is included within the dashboard. Whatever the key indicators, the dashboard should add value and trust in figures from the start, showing the current status at a glance, as well as providing alerts when specific criteria are met.
5. Help the transition
We are far enough along this data-driven business journey to know that it is working for us. However, we recognise that not everyone is as confident. At the moment, we are replacing the old spreadsheets with new dashboards and reports, but we run them in parallel for two or three weeks alongside maintaining those old reports. While individuals could go back to old ways of working, the immediacy of the information, its richness and its focus on actions all mean the spreadsheets are willingly abandoned.
