Insightly_Ep01_edit
===

Jordan Walker: [00:00:00] Alyssa, we have been talking about data with ourselves in random rooms for months now.

Alyssa McGinn: I think

years.

Jordan Walker: Gosh. And now we're finally like going to talk about it on a podcast. Hopefully other people want to listen to this too.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah,

exposing everyone else to our crazy conversations,

Jordan Walker: our nerddom.

Welcome to our nerddom, everyone.

Let's get into a little bit of why we're even doing a data podcast, which I guess on a simple front may sound like not something anybody wants to listen [00:01:00] to, but there's a real practical reason why we're choosing to do this.

Alyssa McGinn: And I think, we've both noticed a gap with the companies that we've talked with other people we've talked with, and really understanding how data does drive innovation and how data does drive growth because so much people hear data and it's technical.

But I feel like, we're really on a mission to bridge that gap and really we've been asking ourselves, why haven't companies been utilizing this asset of data, and how can we help them to really take advantage of that? So I think that's why we're here, right?

Jordan Walker: Yeah.

I think for the benefit of those that don't know who we are and why we're even here talking about this in your company at InfoFluency, you help companies with data visualization and really bridging that gap between all of the ways that they could report on data.

I'm a marketer. I dive into strategy, I dive into what makes smarter sales and marketing programs, and data is crucial [00:02:00] to that and that's how we actually met. You bring the data together, I help activate it for others but to your point, there's such a gap in what data is available and whether companies are actually utilizing it.

And something that I've realized is that, oftentimes it doesn't matter how big of a company we're talking to. The decision makers, they want data and they will tell you, we make decisions based off of data but data driven decision making has become a buzzword and there is a difference between making decisions on just revenue data And making decisions based off of all of the different data points that you have in your company.

That's really where data driven culture comes in and I know we'll talk about that here in a little bit.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah, and to that point, I feel like one of the major issues or roadblocks to that is that the data lives in multiple places. So you talk about [00:03:00] marketing, then you talk about sales, and don't even get into operations or finances.

All that data lives in different applications, but also under the jurisdiction, if you will, of different people in the company. Different people in the company have different fingers, tabs, on what's going on in those departments and, really, there's a lack of collaboration around the conversation of data.

And I think, oftentimes, we've seen, data driven decision making coming from the top, and executives maybe are data driven by looking at some reports and making decisions off of that but really it's so much,~ it's so much ~more than that.

Jordan Walker: Yeah one of the key reasons why I started Bonfire Strategy was what you just hit on.

Data is in different platforms. A lot of times from ~mark,~ sales and marketing perspective, I get the questions of okay, how do we measure our effectiveness? What do we know? What works and what doesn't work, but that question goes so far beyond just how is your social media or your email [00:04:00] performing for your overall sales program, right?

Like you have to have a way to tie that back to like product data and if you're a manufacturing plant, efficiency and operations, just like you said, because that all goes into your overall profitability and how things truly work for you and I was on a mission to demolish the silos

that exist between all of these different departments. I started thinking, initially, it's just breaking down the silo between sales and marketing. These are two teams that need to work better together and collaborate more but after really talking more with you and the kind of data that you dive into, that's when it was really big picture for me to see that, we can't have department silos blocking people from that visibility of how that customer interaction actually plays out through the starting point of a conversation to that product or service actually going out the door.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah and in sales and marketing, you almost have to tie in the financial piece of that and the operational process to deliver those [00:05:00] services to have a holistic picture, right? Yeah. But I think as we'll talk about, you start to knock on the door of some of those questions. And people are like, whoa, that gets a little scary, because there are real technical roadblocks.

That's totally valid but more than that it's a different culture than what's been, how things have been done. It's like sales does this, marketing does this, the finance people stay and run their, reports. Things have to be different for what we're talking about to work.

Jordan Walker: Yeah, and

the fact exists that nowadays, we have more opportunity to capture data than we've ever had before, and this is really going to be the marker of what an innovative company looks like moving forward.

Data driven companies who are not just data driven decision makers, but actually adopting a data driven culture, that is what's going to separate companies from those that survive and those that thrive.

Alyssa McGinn: 100%. I feel like going back to the buzzword of [00:06:00] data, in your experience, what have you felt like has been some of the misconceptions about data?

Because you hear this word data and people tie so many different things to it. Yeah. I'm curious, what do you feel has been holding people back from?

Jordan Walker: I think initially if you look at the makeup of companies that are actually activating data, you really think of enterprise level companies, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, these big companies.

And so the, one of the perceptions that I often hear when I'm talking to companies is that we either can't afford it or we're not big enough. I don't have enough data for that to really make sense. I'm a retail boutique, it does not matter if you are a small business or an enterprise level company, if you are selling a product to a customer, you have data that you could be or a

Alyssa McGinn: service.

Yeah. Or anything.

Jordan Walker: Yeah. Yeah. If you are in business, you have data that you could be operating or making decisions against, but oftentimes we just have that perception of, I'm not big enough. I can't afford it. [00:07:00] But there are so many ways that you can actually tap into it that doesn't require a big expense, and really, the only difference between a small company and a big company is just how much data you get to work with, how complex that data gets, all the systems that it comes from.

Small businesses actually have the best opportunity to start with data because they probably only have a few systems that they're working with.

Alyssa McGinn: And

I think, too, recognizing the data that is stored in the systems that they already have, right? From the smallest business even to, a business in mid market, they're probably using QuickBooks.

Yeah. They're probably using some sort of CRM, maybe it's not as heavy hitting as Salesforce, but they're probably capturing customer data in something, even if it's a spreadsheet, right?

Jordan Walker: You think about some of the platforms that are super popular right now with a lot of like even established small businesses.

Shopify as an online platform, Shopify is a website builder, but it's also a CRM system, Klaviyo, it's an email marketing platform, but it is also a [00:08:00] customer data platform. There are ways, like you said, even if it's in a spreadsheet on a simple level, there are ways that, the data's already being captured, it's just, I find that it's more of, is it in a format that you can take action?

Or is it just a bunch of sticky notes of random thoughts and data points that you've collected and you don't have the time to truly analyze

what's going on?

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah. I feel like another big misconception is just that data and visibility and decision making around data is only something for the people at the top.

It's for your C suite. And besides that. Heck, let's not talk about democratizing the data down to the lowest salesperson because that truly is the essence of a data driven culture, right? But I think~ there's ~there's a huge roadblock when it comes to exposing everyone in the company to data and, the data that's relevant for them and it makes sense for them, of course, but I think, that's been a longstanding norm [00:09:00] that has not yet been broken.

okay, we're the CFO. I make decisions off financial data.

Jordan Walker: I'm the CMO and I only make decisions based off of whether I can track a marketing tactic to revenue that comes in the door. Yeah. That right there hits on what is the difference between data driven decision making and data driven culture and it's really about not just having data to on the top level to identify, okay, what efficiencies could we be bringing in?

~What ways that, ~what ways could AI and automation be helping us, create efficiencies in day to day tasks? Data driven culture means that you are allowing that data to be accessible at all levels of the organization. And ~this seems like for, ~what I think of when I think of that is a lot of companies are really built off ~of~ the Ford model, right?

So the assembly line was one of the most powerful ways that we've created efficiencies within companies and organizations. And that exists even in service based businesses. You have one [00:10:00] department of experts over here. They do their work. It gets packaged up. It goes to the next department. Their experts do the work

and so on and so forth before it goes out the door, right? That's where those data silos exist as well. Each of those departments have their own set of data, and they're maybe operating off of that set of data, and they're maybe making efficiencies off of that set of data within their own departments.

But they all have, the three major company goals that they all have to be held accountable toward. How do you optimize together when you're not even looking at the same set of data?

Alyssa McGinn: It's a great question and the baffled look.

Jordan Walker: I mean it obviously companies have been successful doing it so far but ultimately when we're talking about data driven culture that is the marker that is the differentiator is are you allowing data to only be viewed at the top level and making decisions in a silo like that and filtering it down or are you truly [00:11:00] allowing every person in your organization to have access to data so that they can, evaluate it against their own job roles.

You're giving them more autonomy to be making decisions or bringing up new ideas. That's the difference between checking a box and completing a task and asking your employees who are already loyal to you to help you innovate in the future.

Alyssa McGinn: And that brings up, the question of permissioning and data governance

is, that's become a huge part of this whole movement of data democratization is how do we govern what data is being seen by who? And I think that's the most basic definition of data governance is right person, right place, right data, right? And I think that's, ultimately a seeded fear from the top is we don't need our sales reps to see, our P& L, but there's so much now built into where we can do role based

permissioning, user based permissioning with so much built into that, that you can give [00:12:00] access to your sales rep to see, the customer base. So before they get on the phone with X customer, they can see how recently have they bought, how frequently have they bought what's the value, customer lifetime value of this client.

What was the most recent touch point we had with them? How much better do you think that sales call is going to go when you democratize that data down to that sales rep level? As opposed to them seeing some static report ,once a month, three weeks after that call with that sales rep and they're like, oh, that would have been nice to know before I got on the phone with that guy.

Jordan Walker: Yeah,

and I think of okay the department the marketing department, right?

so same level of data same information if I had the capability of not having to request a report of who are our most profitable customers over XYZ timeframe. I could just go into the CRM system, pull my own report to find out who's our most profitable customers as a marketer. I want that list because I want to go help find more people that look just like them, but profitability on that point [00:13:00] isn't just about money, but it goes back to, okay, how frequently are they purchasing with us?

How are they reviewing our products and services? Have they referred anybody else in our direction? Those are all attributes that get housed in CRM systems that typically, if available, it's only to the sales team. Potentially, the finance team as well. Marketing usually has to request that.

But once that data is available and you're not having to request reports and wait maybe weeks later to get it, you can actually create a lot more turnkey strategies that really help move the needle a lot quicker.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah, I'm excited to dive into, in further episodes, get into some of these specific examples and talk more about the various use cases and the different challenges that we see that come up in each one.

So is there any other additional challenges that you see with companies as we wrap up to create a truly data driven culture?

Jordan Walker: I actually think of what you just mentioned at the top of the call, and you should dive into this a little bit more, but the [00:14:00] technical hurdles let's acknowledge that it is a hurdle.

Alyssa McGinn: A hundred percent, and even if you have the most basic tech stack, a QuickBooks and, a HubSpot for instance, we had a conversation with a company who was doing professional services, so they had a payment gateway. That was syncing to QuickBooks. They also had a CRM system.

Sounds simple enough. We're making it seem so easy.

Just

Just mirror your data together. It's

all great.

And we'll just make some actionable insight. It's gonna be so great. But, this sync wasn't working and so they weren't bringing the names of the services and products from the payment gateway to QuickBooks.

So they had no way to report on which, they had no visibility to see which client was buying which product or service. So that data point not being brought over simply through that middle sink, we couldn't really do a whole lot to help them, understand that until the sink was fixed. And there's technical hurdles much more complex than that, but even at a most basic level, there are really hard technical hurdles [00:15:00] to overcome.

We make it sound

easy,

Jordan Walker: but I think that tech hurdle is actually like from a lot of the conversations that we've had with clients that is the intimidation part of either if you're a big company and you're thinking about all of the different systems that you have, like initially you're going to start to catalog that and think that is an investment to have to figure all of this out, and then you start weighing out your priorities of do I go after revenue generating opportunities that I've always done, or that have worked well for us, or do we make the investment, to tie all these things together, and that is a difficult decision to make, but given where companies of the future are really heading, This is a scenario where you can't do the same thing and expect different results.

And so if you are a company that is in that bucket, again, small or large, even if it sounds intimidating, like one of the very first steps that you could take is simply cataloging. [00:16:00] What systems do you have? What data is being captured? And when we're talking about data, Think about customer touch points.

Think about sales history. Think about revenue. Think about customer service interactions. If you have a call center, if you have, a customer service platform, a chat bot, any of those kind of things. Where does the customer engage with you from the point of prospect to customer? Where are their interactions being housed currently, if they are?

And take a catalog of that so that you're now getting a visual of what opportunities you have. Those hurdles become a lot more simple to actually problem solve when you see the full picture.

Alyssa McGinn: 100%. We would love to hear any questions that anyone has as if you've heard this first initial episode, if this sparks a thought, if this sparks a question, if this sparks a, you guys are crazy, stop doing this, that's great.

Jordan Walker: Hopefully not.

Alyssa McGinn: Yeah, where can they find us?

Jordan Walker: Oh yes, so if anybody has a question that you'd [00:17:00] like us to answer on the podcast or if already you have a particular scenario that you'd like to chat through, shoot us an email hello@insightlypodcast.Com.

Alyssa McGinn: Hello@insightlypodcast.com.

Jordan Walker: You got it!