A Commercial Insights Platform In 3 Steps
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Many companies are data rich and information poor. A commercial insights platform can fix that.
It converts raw data into actionable information or insight.
That's essential as insights are needed to create effective strategies, deliver differentiated products or services, accelerate business execution, or make informed decisions.
In fact, the quality of your business insights directly links to the pace and achievement of your business outcomes.
Average leaders build business strategies and Go-to-Market models based on products and markets. Great leaders build strategies based on business intelligence. The results are markedly different. Consider Apple who applies customer insights to define customer experiences that create emotional connections. Compare that to Samsung who starts with product specifications and connects rationally.
At a strategic level, insights surface things like market movements, industry trends and competitive intelligence.
This type of information can identify growth opportunities, adapt to competitive threats, adjust resource allocations, and optimize investments. The information may be instrumental in expanding into new markets, introducing new products, or optimizing price strategies.
At a more tactical level insights may help business development professionals gather customer behaviors that can be used to increase customer acquisitions, lifetime value and retention.
But to do any of this, you need a commercial insights platform. And it can be created in a 3-step process.
Data Transformation
Data is just as important to the business as products, services and processes. But this is a foreign concept for some managers.
According to the Salesforce Trends in Data and Analytics report, 94% of business leaders say their companies do not get enough value from their data.
To do better, start by defining a data transformation process to convert data from a raw material to a staged information asset.
The below technology footprint shows how this end-to-end process can be automated.
Without an automated process where data is converted and organized in a data lake or business application, business intelligence is haphazard, process automation is lost, and insights will be used sparingly, if used at all.
"Data is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine."
— Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner Research
Insights Generation
Business applications or business intelligence (BI) data models can take the information to the next level.
A commercial insights platform need not be a new application.
Most of the time you can use the business systems you already have to generate powerful insights. That's because most business applications have advanced analytics, AI and Machine Learning capabilities.
Your ERP system is the application for product, vendor and spend insights.
Your CRM system is the application for customer, sales and revenue insights.
You can also use low code BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau.
These applications and tools can identify patterns and group data into cohorts and segments.
They can uncover subtle trends, not-so-obvious correlations and hidden performance patterns.
They can surface root causes and key drivers, and Show the "why" behind the findings.
And they can display all of these things with graphical visualizations that simplify and aid decision-making.
When helping clients design commercial insights platforms, we find it helpful to apply a two-step process.
First group commercial insights into the categories that will most aid management decision making. Below are some common groups.
Second, identify the most powerful questions that you want answered. Below are some examples.
- What are the optimal prices I should be charging for my products and services (price elasticity)?
- Which of my products or services are declining in customer value, or what products and services would my customers buy if I offered them? Or put another way, what new products and services should be created, and which should be retired?
- What ~20% of customers generate ~75% of margins and profits? Other than spend, what makes this segment different than others?
- What ~20% of customers deliver ~80% of the referrals that result in new sales?
- What ~5-10% of customers contribute negative profits? Other than cost to support, what makes this segment different than others? And what can I do to reduce this negative cash flow?
- What is my customer lifetime value by customer segment? And how can I increase it?
One more thing.
Not all information is equal in value and impact. Focusing on the information that delivers the most impactful results will accelerate your program.
The information continuum, which we illustrate in a pyramid model, shows how different types of information deliver progressively greater business impact.
Information Distribution
Information is powerless unless and until it creates action.
This final step defines how the commercial insights platform will distribute information to the person who can use it.
From over two decades of business analytics experience, I'll share the reality that you cannot expect employees to manually go find insights. Instead, information must be automated with real-time, push-based contextual delivery. The two best distribution methods are notifications and dashboards.
Real-Time Notifications
Push-based notifications include things like the following:
- Guided execution, such as next-best-action recommendations or prescriptive advice that looks a lot like 1 on 1 coaching.
- Content recommendations such as sales plays or marketing collaterals. These recommendations can be defined by customer pain point, type of customer, purchase journey position and other factors.
- Display of deviations that prompt real-time corrective action. Variance alerts permit proactive adjustments to head off problems before they happen or remedy performance shortfalls before they exacerbate.
Push-based notifications deliver real-time decision support in the forms of chat, on-screen messages, SMS texts, in-app displays, and emails.
Most business applications have workflow tools to configure these types of information displays. Those tools include things like rules-based alerts, AI algorithms, interactive dialogues and collaborative prompts.
This push-based technology facilitates guided execution, eliminates staff search time, and better leverages your company's insights.
According to Gartner, by next year, employees will reduce the time spent looking for information by 50% as information finds them in the context of their work activity.
Dashboards
Dashboards can display insights based on role, importance or timing.
This context elevates information from being visible to being valuable. That's critical as it also shifts information from being merely interesting to inducing action.
Dashboards must be designed to deliver insights that answer important questions, help people make better decisions, and encourage action to lift performance.
Grouping insights helps create an easy to consume visual interface that can be easily navigated from high-level information to supporting details.
For example, the below RevOps dashboard is designed to display the most important revenue measures at the top. It then displays supporting marketing, sales and customer service measures below.
An interesting thing about insights-based dashboards is that staff spend less time accessing information and more time adjusting plans and actions. That's the sign of successful reporting. If it's causing behavioral changes, it's working.
Insights can also be used for forward-looking analytics.
For example, we built the below predictive analytics model to show how lower-level activities align and drive the company's top priorities.
This type of pro forma model allows managers to compare alternative strategies or scenarios. It provides data-driven intelligence to engineer outcomes and plot the shortest path to objectives.
The ability to convert data into forward looking actionable insights is one of only four sustainable competitive advantages. That's because unlike products or services which deteriorate over time, accurately engineering the future never loses its value.
The More You Know the Faster You Grow
A commercial insights platform is less about software tools and technologies and more about defining information and insights that drive business strategies, management decisions and staff performance.
The most successful companies are defined by their ability to collect and curate the right data, use data to create differentiating products and customer experiences, and apply insights at every customer engagement and decision point.
It's a complex undertaking for sure, which is why those who succeed will achieve competitive advantage over those who don't.
Most companies have the systems and data. However, they may be unfamiliar with how to harvest and transform that raw data into actionable intelligence.
Fortunately, there are partners that can help. Johnny Grow is one of those partners.
Our business analytics consultants are experts in helping clients turn data into their most valuable asset.
"Knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant, and perhaps even the only, source of competitive advantage." — Peter Drucker, educator, management consultant and author of modern management theory