Talk about famous last words. When we last left this topic, I was wrapping up coffee with my colleague, Rick, with the ominous, “Once we get your data organized …”
It’s a good thing we had fueled up on coffee because, even with a 24 x 7 or so work cycle between our US and India analytic teams, managed markets data are downright dirty. The problems came at us from all sides:
Before Rick, the team and I dove into these deep waters, we took a few deep breaths and laid out some guiding ‘principles’ for how we’d break down this large problem, solve the right components first and build it back up to a sustainable ongoing solution:
Our “crawl” (that was even the official name of the project phase on our Gannt charts) began with the seemingly gargantuan task of building the processes, tools and operations to integrate the data, reliably and repeatedly. Long days and late nights ensued. Many cups of coffee were consumed, unfortunately not in the “third space” of some hip espresso bar, but in the basement rabbit warren of the office where IT, analytics and operations teams often seem to get put.
Grumpy analysts changed the first phase name from “Crawl” to “Slog.”
But, nothing motivates a team like a deadline and the next sales meeting loomed large on the calendar. The team’s collective meticulous attention paid to documentation, development of data dictionaries & business rules, and the implementation of robust data integration engines eventually paid off as we were able to deliver repeatable data management/governance processes and analysis-ready databases …
… that fed user-friendly reports to the Key Account Manager’s (KAMs) iPads:
As proud as we were of what we had accomplished, we knew we were still just crawling (well, maybe, we were upright and at a very slow walk). We knew the euphoria would be short-lived: as with account-based selling across multiple industries, the secondary data, even when cleaned and well-integrated, failed to capture all of the nuances and fields of information needed to optimally manage the accounts.
Fortunately, we had already mapped out the next phase of the project (“Walk This Way”): turning the KAMs’ new toys (iPads) into a well-structured and focused tool to capture targeted field intelligence from the KAMs, such as …
… so that we could transform anecdotal knowledge trapped in individual KAMs' heads to a corporate asset, an Account Profile Master database. While we never marketed it this way to the KAMs, our goal was to create a user-friendly app that would deceptively suck years and decades of accumulated wisdom from the KAMs’ minds: we wanted to tap right into and extract (painlessly) the KAM Braintrust.
Having already “won over” the field with a sleek reporting engine, the pilot of the Account Profiling tool (which linked seamlessly to their existing CRM) with a subset of KAMs went smoothly. By incorporating the pilot team’s feedback, Rick and the team were able to rollout not only the updated Account Profiling tool, but a fully-integrated process that had end-to-end integration of the secondary data with the ‘KAM Braintrust’ (e.g., the Corporate Account Profile Master):
The team certainly earned a few days of relaxation … but only a few days, because, with the power of such data at the fingertips of the organization, Rick knew the business questions for even deeper-dives and more analytics would start coming from all sides.
Coming up next to conclude this blog series – Running an MMA Marathon