Data-Driven Work Cultures: Dmitrii Kustov of Trade Panther On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level
An Interview With Pierre Brunelle
You have to track and use your data. The process of collecting, identifying, and categorizing individual data points throughout the data pipeline is necessary to be used in the analysis.
As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dmitrii Kustov.
Dmitrii is a data-driven Marketing Director who helps companies get the most out of their marketing budget to increase market share and revenue.
He has significantly increased the online presence of the Trades industry brands like Happy Hiller, ESCO, Polestar Plumbing, and more.
He is the founder of Regex SEO and Trade Panther — data-driven marketing agencies that care about the efficiency of business growth, not just the number of leads.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I founded Regex SEO in 2015. I was on my own initially: I had a background in coding and SEO, and I outsourced the web design. After about two years, I started to work together with two of my friends who had their own company, specializing more in web design. Once they approached me, we decided to do a trade-off in terms of working. If they had any SEO work, they sent clients my way, and if I had any web design work, I sent clients their way. After some time, we realized that it’d be better for us to merge our companies into one, and so we did.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?
I thought it’d be easy when I started my own company. I saw people around who managed to run their business and thought to myself, “hm, this guy isn’t very smart, but he succeeds in business. Is it so easy?” So when I started, I thought it would be straightforward because there were so many people around who could do it, so I could do it too. I was very confident: I knew a lot about Internet marketing and SEO, and I was sure that would be enough. But in fact, it turned out that I knew nothing about running a business. I knew nothing about finding and hiring people, doing taxes and bookkeeping, sales, etc.
The lesson, or so to say, “take away,” I learned from this experience is the importance of the team. Your team is the key. A company doesn’t exist without a team. So my experience is telling me, and I’m sure of the next thing: team members are one of the main ingredients of a successful company.
Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I can’t share the exact book, podcast, or film, but I can give two names of people who inspired me at some point and made a significant impact on me. Their names are Seth Godin and Simon Sinek. To be more precise, the speeches “Your Job is to Make Art” by Seth Godin and “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek.
Seth Godin is a general marketer whose work I appreciate. This particular speech highlights the simple idea of treating your work as an art. He pushes the concept ‘people like us (do things like this).’ To become notable and visible, you first need to realize that there are a lot of copies, but people only love unique things. Secondly, you have to understand that in today’s world, you will fail if you try to aim your messages to a huge audience. The goal is to find weirdos like you and interact only with them. And to succeed, you have to convince that bunch of people (which doesn’t have to be small necessarily) that what YOU DO and what YOU PROPOSE is unique, unusual, and not like everyone else.
The idea of Simon Sinek’s speech is also related to how you have to treat your work and everything you basically do. He draws a line of questions ‘what, how, and why.’ He believes that almost all companies can answer questions ‘what they do’ and ‘how they do this,’ but almost no one can tell exactly ‘why they do it.’ And that’s the problem. To be truly successful, you need to know and broadcast the idea of why you do what you do because Simon thinks that real leadership is putting desires, values, and beliefs into words. So the idea of good leadership is to surround yourself with people who believe in what you believe. And this happens very naturally if you’re able to verbally express your belief (which most people cannot do).
Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
Right now, we are in the process of redefining our company. We want to change our company’s vision under the slogan “Imagine the World Where Business Growth is 100% Efficient”. Keeping in mind what I said above when Simon Sinek asks “why,” the answer will be “because we care.”
At this point, our company wants to delve into helping HVAC companies with marketing development. Our new project: a sub-brand serving the HVAC industry. The idea is not only that we have been working with companies of this type for quite a long time, and we understand all the intricacies of this area. But also in the fact that we want to build a relationship of trust with our clients where both parties care about what they do. No useless, annoying ads and no selling for the sake of selling. We work with companies to get into their business and its intricacies to provide the services they really need. We don’t work with teams that don’t want to get involved in processes and that don’t even try to understand what we do and why. In turn, this leads to specific customers who treat everything that way. Such companies will not rip off their customers, and elderly people will not be afraid to call such companies when they are alone at home because they will be sure that this provider will not cash in on them and cheat them.
Not only do we want to develop this attitude in our business, but we also want to popularize it and build a better world where people are not afraid to cooperate with anyone. And this principle it’s not going to reduce your revenue or any of your performance data, but rather the opposite. It’s going to help you build an honest and profitable business. It’s always nice to work with people who care about what they do. You’re always confident in such companies, and it’s a pleasure to come back to them and work with them.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?
The principle “data-driven” means making all decisions after looking at data. It’s when all the decisions you make about your business are based on numbers, not on some hunch or prediction of events. It is not for nothing that big data is considered the main engine of business innovation. Making decisions based on reliable data rather than intuition, observation, or guesswork, is the only right way to achieve your goals successfully. Of course, the value of data-driven decisions depends on the quality of the data, its analysis, and its interpretation. Today, however, data-driven decision-making is prevalent in almost every sector, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and hospitality, manufacturing, retail, and entertainment. That’s why it’s impossible to build a successful, profitable business today without the ability to work with data.
Which companies can most benefit from tools that empower data collaboration?
All companies, with no exception, will benefit from tools that empower data collaboration. Sharing data across teams and departments empowers everyone in the company to make better decisions overall, as there would be no guesswork involved. The idea is simple; for example, if your marketing team does not have access to data from the sales team, how would they know if marketing strategies are truly working?
We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.
By using data analytics to create complete customer profiles from that data, companies can gain insights into customer behavior to provide a more personalized experience. Businesses can use data analytics to make business decisions and minimize financial losses. Predictive analytics can suggest what might happen in response to changes in the business, and prescriptive analytics can indicate how the business should respond to those changes. Data analytics can help an organization understand risks and take preventive action. And so on. In our own experience, we, as Regex SEO, doubled the revenue and the margins in one year, using proper data analytics and data collaboration. The same approach allowed us to help reduce unnecessary costs and increase our clients’ profits.
Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?
It’s very challenging for people and businesses that have not been tracking data before and have not been using data to make decisions to start doing it. Suppose these people used to make decisions just because; without data proof, it will be difficult for them to change their minds and approach. Therefore, the biggest challenge is to help leaders of the company/business, owners, marketing directors, etc., start looking at all the decisions from the point of data rather than without it. Setting up data tracking isn’t cheap; it takes time and effort, and it might seem like a waste of time and money at first. However, even after a short period after the implementation of data tracking, all will see benefits from a revenue perspective, cost perspective, and so on.
Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.
How can you effectively leverage the data? Firstly, you have to track and use your data. The process of collecting, identifying, and categorizing individual data points throughout the data pipeline is necessary to be used in the analysis. Then, after collection and analysis, you have the opportunity to cut costs on campaigns or efforts that are not performing well; that’s the second step. Besides, double down on campaigns or efforts that have been bringing good results. After all this, analyze all your companies and proceed to the third step: optimization. Almost everything can be optimized: bad companies can be good companies if you optimize them properly, and good companies can be just the best, again, if you resort to optimization. Fourth tip: coordinate sales and marketing efforts. Your sales and marketing teams don’t have to be separate units. They are all one cohesive unit. Using integrated tools to bridge the gap between sales and marketing, adding feedback reports so marketing and sales departments can share feedback and data with each other, and bringing everyone together around a common goal by sharing marketing strategies with the sales department and sales strategies with the marketing department is the way to go. And the fifth piece of advice: don’t forget that some metrics are more important than others. There is no need to create a strategy based on ALL DATA you have; approach it wisely.
The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven? The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?
A data-driven culture is essential to the survival and expansion of organizations. Data will increasingly be used to make decisions at all levels of the organization. And as practice shows, even today, the better the business performance, the more data-driven the company is. But so far, most organizations still lack a systematic data-driven decision-making process. But one way or another, I believe that in the near future, data must be an integral part of this decision-making process to get the most out of everything.
Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?
Yes, our plans are great. First, we are developing the idea of creating our software, which will primarily help us in our project management, but we also understand that the need for this kind of software is high, and we will certainly release it to the world.
We also work on creating international team hubs in different countries worldwide. Of course, today, we already work on a contract basis with people from all over the world. Our goal is to create a space for people in different cities, so teams can partially meet, spend time together, attend offline events, and communicate in every possible way.
We are also now already working on the launch of the media branch of the company. So far, we plan to launch our own podcast in the near future.
Talking about the difficulties that await us: there are typical business growth pains and finding the right team members. Fortunately, we have always been good at analyzing and working with data, so this time too, this skill will help us overcome many of our expected challenges. For us, data is a huge part of decision-making, and actually, that’s how we are going to achieve all the goals.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About The Interviewer: Pierre Brunelle is co-CEO and Chief Product Officer (CPO) of Noteable, the collaborative notebook platform that enables teams to use and visualize data, together. Prior to Noteable, Brunelle led Amazon’s internal and SageMaker notebook initiatives. Pierre holds an MS in Building Engineering and an MRes in Decision Sciences and Risk Management.
