Analytics Is Pointless Without Accountability

Analytics is more about decision-making than data.

A few years go I did an analytics consulting project for a marketing team at a large technology company. My team and I did a data integration that stitched their marketing platform data with Salesforce. This allowed his team to tie out marketing campaigns and content to closed sales and opportunity pipeline.

The client was very impressed and wanted us to fly out to the company HQ and deliver a presentation on what we had built to his SVP.

We arrived and presented the tool. About halfway through, we started digging into some of the sales numbers. The client had a big smile on his face — “the stuff they’ve built is just incredible,” he said, hoping for a similar reaction from his boss. In response, the SVP, with a look of concern, said, “I’m not sure we want to be beholden to these numbers.” The meeting immediately deflated, going from showing off to a defense hearing. The final question from the SVP: “Can you guys do anything with Share of Voice?”

We were incredulous. We’d built a toolset that the companies own internal 50+ employee analytics team couldn’t build, and done it in a couple of months. But we had missed one simple fact — they wanted analytics, but not accountability.

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