Visibility is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

As I have written about before, “analytics” is a popular term in business today, but it can be confusing about what it truly means. This is particularly true when it comes to analytics related to marketing and sales. There are many different solutions on the market today that offer marketing and sales analytics of some kind. They range from CRM and marketing automation platforms with internal analytics tools to highly customizable and very broad business intelligence suites to products that focus just on particular pieces of the process, like marketing campaign attribution or sales pipeline reporting.

What’s interesting to me as the CEO of a company in the space is that while the available solutions vary widely in price points and functionality sets, nearly all of them focus their attention on “visibility.” By visibility, I mean pulling from marketing and sales data and showing you a pretty dashboard or series of charts. The pitch is that each of these tools gives you greater marketing or sales visibility. I have spoken and written about the importance of effective visibility many times myself, so I see where they are coming from, but I also am very aware of the limitations of this approach.

Visibility is the Tip of the Iceberg

The challenge is that visibility really is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the part that you can see above the water. It’s the part that many marketing ops and sales ops managers are focusing on because their boss is asking for it or because they want to reduce the amount of time they personally spend crunching numbers in Excel spreadsheets. Obtaining full visibility into your data is very important, especially if you did not have it before. But the problem is that visibility in itself does not take you anywhere. If the captain of the Titanic would have focused on more than just visibility, it would have been a very different outcome. The same is true in business.

What Story Does Your Data Tell?

The next part of the iceberg that lurks below the water are the stories that come from your data. In my experience, your data always tells a story, and oftentimes it tells multiple stories that include both positive and negative insights. Those stories aren’t always visible from a simple bar chart with a trend line, however.

Digging deeper into the data and surfacing the true stories that a business needs to hear is the challenge that visionary marketing and sales analytics solutions need to embrace. The obstacle, of course, is the stories oftentimes require interpretation. To know what the data is telling you, you have to understand the business you’re working with and its marketing and sales processes. Effective solutions don’t stop at providing visibility. They take the next step and uncover the stories that need heard.

Actions to Improve Revenue Results

While uncovering the story in your data is the next step after visibility, there is an even deeper and larger part of the iceberg hidden underneath the water. That last portion is where you use the data and use the stories you have learned to take action to improve your revenue results.

This component is what I don’t see any solutions on the market today getting into far enough. Visibility and dashboards are only meaningful if you actually can take actions from them. The best marketing and sales analytics solutions of tomorrow won’t stop at visibility. They will demonstrate a measurable increase in your sales results by providing actions for you to take with the information.

Here is a simple example to tie these concepts together and help you see the entire iceberg. Let’s say a hypothetical company is generating a lot of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and those MQLs are being handed off to sales for follow-up. 

Visibility for this part of the process could be showing you how many new MQLs are being generated each week or month and how many are converting or moving forward in the funnel.

Understanding the story in this data could be looking at where those MQLs are coming from, what types of companies they are with and how specifically they are being followed up on by sales. For example, you might see if the sales team calls each MQL on average at least three times, then there is a significant jump in conversion rates versus if they call them only once.

Taking action to improve results could then consist of implementing a playbook or Service Level Agreement that ensures each new MQL moving forward gets called the required number of times. As a result of these actions, overall conversion rates increase, as does your overall new revenue.

I hope more solutions in the space move beyond just focusing on data visibility. By understanding the story that is hidden in the data and the using that information to take action, many more businesses can use analytics as a powerful tool to improve their ultimate revenue results.

Beyond the Surface

Along with making sure you get revenue results out of your analytics tool, you will want to consider the cost and time to customize, deploy, maintain and make changes. My past blog, Artisanal Brew vs. Custom Kitchen, can help you evaluate what type of solution is best for your company.