Is your company data an iceberg?
Exploring the challenges to unlocking commercial value from your data…
Clients often tell me that data is their biggest asset – and they’re right, it should be. But in my experience, the majority of organisations fail to unlock the full commercial value of their data. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that most businesses lack full visibility of their customer data.
“I often refer to data as an iceberg – so much of it lies beneath the surface.”
This lack of visibility and the unfulfilled potential value is why I often refer to data as an iceberg – so much of it lies beneath the surface. Invisible.
I’d say that only around 20% of the average organisation’s data is visible. This is the data businesses regularly access, update and use – data their analysts, marketing and sales teams see and report on. So what about the remaining 80%? This is data companies aren’t paying attention to. It’s legacy data, associated data and, by and large, data that’s seen as too hard to analyse.
In this series of six posts, I’ll explore the reasons why businesses lack visibility of their data and fail to maximise its commercial value.
A lack of direction.
An organisation’s ability to create insight that can be used for commercial gain isn’t just a data analyst’s job – everyone needs to take responsibility.
Creating commercial value from your data requires collaboration. Marketing and sales teams need to work with analysts to agree outcomes, share perspectives and plot a roadmap to get there. The right culture is key in achieving this. Far too often, there’s a distrust of data and how reports and insight might be used by senior management.
Data needs context for it to be fully understood. And so collaboration between analysts and those closest to customers (marketing and sales teams) is fundamental to creating actionable insight.
Failure to audit.
“B2B customer data degrades at a rate of 3% a month.”
On average, B2B customer data decays at a rate of 3% a month. It means that without cleansing and enriching your database, 28.5% will become outdated every year.
But if data decay – and the loss of valuable data – isn’t enough of a concern, then compliance should be. The more out of date and disconnected your data is, the more likely you are to be breaching GDPR.
Managing and maintaining data quality is never-ending, but mission-critical. To start, you need visibility of the quality of your entire database, enabling you to report on data integrity, last contact date and compliance.
Regular data audits will provide you with full visibility of any issues, giving you the insight needed to make improvements to data integrity and processes. Over time, this will help you start identifying opportunities to deliver commercial value.
Complex and inaccessible reporting.
To realise the full potential of your data, you need to make the complex simple and the inaccessible accessible. But if the only people who understand your company’s data – and its value to your business – are analysts, you’re failing.
Organisations must democratise data and insight. In part, this is an analyst’s job. Through data modelling, dashboards, visualisations and reporting, they need to make data accessible and easy to understand for the person using it.
Marketing and sales teams should be heavily involved, working with analysts to spot and understand trends, providing the qualitative context for any findings. Granted, some technical expertise is required here, but it ultimately links back to culture. Data-minded analysts need to recognise the limitations of creating insight from data alone and non-data minded collaborators – whether from marketing or sales – need to recognise the value data can bring.
Final thought.
The good news is that you don’t need to move heaven and earth to overcome these challenges. Sure, you can spend millions on new systems and data infrastructure, but without the right strategy, processes and culture you’ll only get so far.
In my next post, I’ll drill down into data strategy, focusing on the steps businesses can take to implement a robust strategy – one that puts you on the path to gaining true commercial value from your data.
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