Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

MORE THAN JUST TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

As mentioned earlier, if you only see customer analytics and BI as technical solutions, you will fail, since they are about helping people make better decisions. Once I was part of an implementation of a customer scorecard (a tool that lists what the company had delivered to customers, including whether it was meeting service-level agreements). We learned that even though it is obvious that the sales staff should use such a tool in order to conduct fact-based negotiations with their counterparts, only one-third of them used it. Some did not know about this new tool; others preferred to do it the old way, even though the new method provided a wide-range of process improvements to customers. Of the one-third who used the scorecard, we estimated that they got only one-third of the potential value out of it because they did not apply that information in an optimal way. In other words, if you see customer analytics or any other information system as only a technical discipline, you will realize only a fraction of its potential value—just the tip of the iceberg.

The obvious shortcoming was that the makers of the scorecard had implemented only a technical solution, since they did not consider business processes and the users. The change management element was missing.

We mentioned earlier that there are three types of decision makers. Since the one-third of the one-third rule does not apply to them all, we will go through them one by one.

• Strategic decision ...