The Data Behind Your First Hire
If you were building a brand new team and only had budget to hire one person, who would it be?
Before customer service, operations or marketing; before sales, product or engineering; data comes first in my book — always.
Why? Whether you are building a new team, evaluating an existing one or building a new company — the first step is developing a deep understanding of the landscape.
Who are your most valuable customers? Are they buying your product? What are they buying? How much are they buying? Who are your competitors? What are people buying from them? Which marketing programs are working? Which ones aren’t working? Are you retaining customers? And so on, and so on…
Action without understanding is like walking into a beehive. You are going to get stung.
Yet, a lot of leaders go into companies and try to rinse and repeat proven strategies from previous lives when conditions could be night and day. A company may think they need to invest heavily in branding, but when you dig into the data, could find they are losing a high percentage of existing customers. Developing aggressive acquisition strategies in this case may be very wasteful. Or, you may be targeting a certain customer type to find out that they spend very little with you in the end; that those who have the biggest baskets are being frustrated by the current experience.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of data available, and many companies (especially if they are just starting out) have very little access to it. Unlocking the data kingdom up front does two things. 1) It provides much needed answers to how you are doing now and 2) spawns more questions and hypotheses to prove out across the company.
Once you have a deep understanding of the landscape, you are ready for action. Chances are that from your initial findings, you have several hypotheses that need to be tested. But how will you know if potential solutions prove them correct?
It is a data analyst that can help you set up the testing framework from the get go — so that you have proper controls in place to know what happened with a significant level of confidence. And without any other staff to execute quite yet — your tests will need to be small and scrappy. After all, you may be implementing them yourself with just one team member.
At least until you make your second hire… Who would that be? That one depends on your particular business needs (often answered by data).
But data will always comes first.
— — — — — — — — — — — — -
Michelle Denogean is the former CMO at Edmunds.com. She is a senior marketing executive, thought leader & practitioner in the world of business strategy, growth marketing, brand communications and digital disruption. Michelle is currently advising and consulting with companies looking to disrupt their respective industries. This post is part of her leadership {playbook}, intended to advise, inspire and mentor leaders at all levels.
Follow Michelle on Twitter: @DenogeanNow
