Measure What Matters.

Does your data show deal movement?

Back when the internet became accessible to the average individual there was great excitement around two things. First was the reach the internet offered to both publishers and consumers. And a close second was the amount of data you could gather based on the publication and consumption of this digital content.

Years passed and many gazillion pieces of digital content have been created, published and consumed. We got addicted to looking at our Google Analytics reports, lurking behind the digital curtain trying to sleuth some new truths or nuggets of wisdom about our anonymous consumers, high-fiving over traffic spikes or increased time spent on page views. We got hooked on looking at the info, creating reports on the info, and letting that info be a large determining factor in whether something was deemed successful or not. Clicks and time-spent became the two-headed holy grail of the internet.

Yet other folks were digging into this data, trying to gain insights from what it could tell us, or see in what directions it might point us.

Data is only as good as the reliability of the source, and the intention for which you are gathering it.

In many organizations, there was still a rather passive relationship with data and statistics. It was a by-product that was consumed at the end of an initiative, used as a way to measure volume success instead of inspiring future initiatives, effort and business success.

Smarter Connections to the Business

We’ve seen an explosion of products that promise they can perform in smarter and more effective ways than actual humans can — through personalization, automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Each platform has a different take on it, but most ignore a very important part of the data set when it comes to marketing and sales — conversion data.

Clicks do not equate to deal stages advancing, time-spent does not always point towards client acquisition, and a well received video by the general public does not mean your sales rep landed the meeting they were looking to secure in order to close a sale. Data is the most important asset your company can collect and leverage — yet many aren’t even scratching the surface as it relates to actually moving the company forward.

“One of the best illustrations of the value of data was not a technology company being bought, but a casino operator going broke. In 2015, weighed down by $24 billion of debt, Caesars Entertainment Corp filed for bankruptcy. The curious part of the proceedings was a complaint made by the creditors, who argued that an item in Caesars’ asset list had been grossly undervalued. In their view, the most valuable thing that Caesars owned was not its real estate or brands, but its data. The creditors argued that the Total Rewards customer database, made up of seventeen years of data on some 45 million program members, should have been valued at US$1 billion.” — Mike Walsh, author of “The Algorithmic Leader”.

As noted in Harvard Business Review’s analysis of how Caesars had leveraged data:

“Data mining has led Caesar’s to develop 90 different customer segment classifications, each of which responds differently to different marketing approaches — again allowing for a more customer-centric approach to service.”

B2B and B2C are Completely Different Animals

Additionally, we need to accept that most of the models and platforms we are relying upon in our B2B organizations were built on the backbone of B2C businesses. Systems were built to measure and predict consumer behavior in e-commerce scenarios, where the purchases were for individuals, and the cost point was much lower than a typical B2B enterprise level deal. In those scenarios, clicks and engagement with ads on social platforms does matter, as does a user’s journey from ad, to e-commerce site, to purchase.

Several of the heavy hitting CRMs out there seem to acknowledge there is a completely different buyer journey when it comes to larger deals which are being decided upon by groups of people over months, but they still place value on interactions and data points that are less relevant for this deal type. They still support siloed structural issues within sales and marketing teams where collaboration is critical. They don’t measure how seller to buyer interactions move the deal forward, and what content is being connected to each one of those interactions as a qualifier.

There is more value placed in lead generation than the long nurturing tail which is a reality in closing enterprise B2B sales.

As technology and software adapts to the needs of larger distributed workforces, and organizations realize how important collaboration and workflow are to optimizing all aspects of their businesses, I expect we will see a shift in how we think about data, and how we record and synthesize it. We need to be measuring what matters within an organization’s human-to-human interactions, both internally and externally. Focusing on the momentum and progress instead of singular data points will empower machine learning and AI to get predictive and deliver insights, not just fancy reports within individual or departmental silos.

More on technology, specifically AI and machine learning, coming soon!

Tracey Halvorsen is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Return Solutions. Return is a SaaS application for sales enablement and real-time business intelligence. The Return platform empowers enterprises to fully harness the great work that is happening across the organization, allowing them to limit administrative tasks, get smarter and close more deals.