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

USING LEARNING INFORMATION TO IMPROVE YOUR STRATEGY

In this section you can read more about different levels of integration between the overall company or sales strategy and customer analytics. The purpose of this analysis is to provide you with a framework to help you analyze how you work with customer analytics today and how you should work with it in the future. There is no right or wrong answer to this; it is essentially down to how your company chooses to compete.

Exhibit 8.2 shows the information wheel (which also was presented in Chapter 1). This exhibit shows how customer analytics can be closely linked to overall company strategy; however, there also should be some feedback mechanisms that provide input on the current and future strategies beyond a KPI level. This exhibit also shows why customer analytics projects so often fail since typically they are cross-functional projects that require strong project manager skills and management support.

Exhibit 8.2 Information Wheel

Even though there might be many potential stakeholders involved when doing customer analytics, particularly when starting up new projects, the rest of this section focuses only on the relationship between the strategy department or whoever is the owner and creator of the strategy-making process and the customer analytics function. This relationship can be well integrated, as shown Exhibit 8.3.

Exhibit ...