Summary of our event: Roundtable - Data-driven business decisions

Short summary of our event:

We humans often make decisions within seconds, based on emotion and intuition. We are largely emotional by nature. But when it comes to important business decisions, it is critical that they are based on as many factors as possible, and that they are based on facts.

Using data and not gut instinct to make business decisions is something that all companies have challenges with, which is also an incredible opportunity to grow their business. 

On Thursday 31st March, Leadfront gathered with a select group of B2B sales and marketing executives to discuss the challenges and success factors of making data-driven decisions. Data quality, ownership in the organisation, the importance of having common processes, and models to understand the importance of different activities through the buying journey were discussed.

We have summarised some of the most interesting discussion points from the event below, categorised into perceived challenges and common success factors.

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A good understanding of the current situation lays the foundation for improvement.

Here's a list of the most common challenges that lead to not always being able to trust the data or get the whole picture when making data-driven decisions:

• Reports and dashboards based on data are only as good as the underlying data. If work processes are not followed, it can easily lead to wrong decisions.
• Data silos and one-way integrations are a common source of data quality problems. Not being able to clean the data at the source leads to the data at the destination being continuously overwritten with incorrect data, which simply leads to the data not being trusted.
• In the sales organisation, it is common for data to be collected by sales people. Not entering the data continuously, in the right format and according to procedures and processes is one of the biggest challenges for sales. It leads to a picture of data that does not match reality, resulting in decisions being made on the wrong basis.
• Sales revenue models and a focus on quick and short-term sales targets set the stage for a prioritisation by sales people that can easily lead to a de-prioritisation of data collection in a CRM system. To change this, you need to change the source of the problem and give sales people clear information and ensure that there is time, support and understanding as to why it is important to follow these processes.
• The common division between marketing and sales easily creates challenges, not least in creating a common picture of the customer journey and how to measure and value the different activities that make up the customer journey. Discussions can easily arise around which function or department contributed most to a deal, when in reality there have been a number of interactions of different parts of the company that contributed to a deal. 

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It's not always easy to drive change, because people have a natural resistance to it. As a leader of the sales and marketing department, it is important to find support processes and tools to help the team evolve towards a desired state. Of course, it is important to remember that change requires hard work and patience, and should be seen as a process rather than an activity.

Here is a list of success factors for an organisation or department to move towards a more data-driven behaviour:

• Having common definitions in the SMarketing process (from site visitor to customer) is the foundation to start measuring, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from your data.
• The joint process changes over time. It is important to continuously work on the process as the business and customers change.
• In order to interpret data correctly, it is necessary to take into account different aspects and perspectives and try to get a picture of the whole and not get stuck in focusing too often on individual data points. For example, a good graph for analysing delivery between different service desk agents takes into account the different aspects of a service desk agent's delivery such as the number of closed cases, the type of case and customer satisfaction.
• In order to maintain data quality in the organisation, it is important that all department heads are trained in data issues, and take responsibility for the data collected and processed in their respective departments.
• Management needs to be aware of the importance of data quality and its impact on higher-level decision-making. Management that takes an active role in these issues creates a better basis for department heads to prioritise correctly further down the operational level. It is becoming increasingly common to designate a function with overall responsibility for data and data quality. 
• Data must be prioritised and responsibility for data quality must be assigned to different people. For example, a web analyst bears the main responsibility for data quality in the data collected and analysed for web visitors.
• The most common source of inaccurate data is the human factor, through carelessness, ignorance or lack of interest, for example. It is therefore worth reducing the need for manual data entry, both for data collected from customers and web visitors, and from sales or customer service. Linking to third-party data to populate and update data is a good way to streamline while improving data quality.
• A joint team (e.g. Revenue team or Growth team) with members from both the sales and marketing departments can be a good replacement for the traditional approach. This will provide a good basis for looking at the customer journey as a whole and analysing which activities drive the customer through the buying journey
• As a department head, you drive the behaviour of your team members. It is important to keep this in mind when measuring, and rewarding employees based on a specific metric. You do more of what you are measured on.
• Important to have a common understanding between marketing and sales - Defining leads together creates better quality in both directions.

If you want to read more about the event or register your interest to get the chance to be invited to the next event, you can do so here.

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