Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

TRACK YOUR OUTCOMES

The last stage of the IMPACT cycle is to ensure that your analysts track the influence of their recommendations over time. For example, did your analysts suggest targeting small businesses in Cincinnati with half-price offers, in order to drive business in Ohio? If so, what was the outcome? Did the company make money or lose money as a result of what came from your team’s analysis? You must think about this type of tracking early on in the project to make sure your business partners are in a position to provide you with the necessary information, in order to make an educated assessment of whether the initiative made the company money or saved costs.

For example, one of the coauthors, JP Isson, created a customer segmentation model for a telecommunications company in Canada. There was some initial resistance from the sales team to roll out the segmentation model that recommended targeting only certain customers, while forgoing others. However, JP insisted it would work and set up tracking to see the results in a pilot test with some sales teams. After six months, it turned out that the sales teams were seeing larger average order sizes and less customer attrition for sales reps that followed the segmentation model recommendations versus those that did not. As a result, JP was able to convince other leaders regarding the effectiveness of his recommendations, and his segmentation model was adopted by the entire organization.