FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 28, 2023

Sherri Windsor

H2K Labs

sherri@h2klabs.com

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‍H2K Labs has formed a partnership with Channel Metrics, a  cutting-edge data management platform designed to streamline reporting and client delivery across digital advertising, email marketing, lead generation, event marketing, and membership acquisition. The platform marks the second strategic partnership secured by H2K Labs, aimed at empowering clients to grow revenue, minimize costs, and enhance overall business value. 

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Many companies rely on disconnected systems to generate leads and contacts, and these systems rarely connect elegantly. This is especially true for brands with two-sided business models: membership communities, event management, marketing service providers, and business information brands. Faced with increasingly strict lead governance, and declining rates of satisfaction and retention, these teams spend an extraordinary amount of time and labor cleansing, enriching, and deduplicating the contacts they send to clients. Worse still, regulatory environments (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) force agencies to add compliance costs to their overhead or face the consequences.

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Channel Metrics is a web-based unified data management system designed specifically to tackle these challenges. By blending, enriching, and deduplicating data from disparate systems and presenting it in an intuitive interface, Channel Metrics helps brands dramatically reduce the costs required to meet the demands of their clients. Users can generate comprehensive, accurate reports for customers, covering everything from digital advertising, to lead generation, to event sponsorship. The solution enables automation of lead governance, data scrubbing, and analytics, all of which can be customized to be unique to each client.

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Purpose-built for the two-sided delivery model, Channel Metrics eliminates the need for manual workarounds and never-ending spreadsheets. By implementing intelligent APIs, users can automate efficiency-stifling tasks, freeing up valuable human talent for more nuanced responsibilities. And, with real-time dashboards and CRM integrations, Channel Metrics can empower brands to deliver contact and lead data faster and with fewer errors than ever before. Finally, data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, ensuring information privacy and global compliance. 

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"We selected Channel Metrics as our partner because it perfectly aligns with the industries we serve. Witnessing Channel Metrics in action, I instantly recognized its potential to save our customers substantial costs and data errors  in creating customer reports and generating leads each year. By consolidating advertising, lead generation, email, newsletter, and event performance data into a unified interface in real-time for sales and customer success teams, it revolutionizes the game. Furthermore, its lead automation module offers functionalities such as cleansing, verification, enrichment, deduplication, and governance, along with near real-time delivery. The resulting cost savings and enhanced customer value are not only compelling but also easily quantifiable," explains Heather Holst-Knudsen, CEO at H2K Labs.

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"We are thrilled to collaborate with H2K Labs on this partnership," said Channel Metrics CEO, Peter Thomas. "Heather and the H2K Labs team have a proven track record of delivering solutions that drive demonstrable ROI for their clients. We're confident that together we will build on that success.”

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The benefits for our clients include: 

• Eliminate manual workarounds and spreadsheets to maximize efficiency in lead delivery.
• Deliver leads in less than a day through real-time dashboards for clients.
• Reduce processing errors and increase client satisfaction through value-added lead information. 
• Increase security with GDPR-compliant data encryption, both at rest and throughout delivery. 

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About H2K Labs

In the battle for revenue growth, H2K Labs is the force multiplier two-sided businesses need to achieve sales increases, cost reductions, and profitability gains. We empower companies with high levels of data complexity and liquidity to thrive in a rapidly evolving market. As veterans in data-driven revenue strategy with over 30 years of experience, we understand the challenges faced by our clients and have developed a data-first approach to help overcome them. Using a blend of AI-powered revenue intelligence, analytics and visualization, and real-world expertise, we help our clients unlock new opportunities for growth, scalability, and future-proofing revenues. 

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About Channel Metrics

Channel Metrics is a unified management platform that blends, enriches, and deduplicates data from disparate systems and presents it in an intuitive interface for event managers, marketing agencies and their clients.

Recently I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion on data-driven revenue growth at the 2023 JEGI/Clarity Media and Technology Conference which took place on April 24th in New York City.  Speakers on the panel included industry leaders Paul Miller, CEO of Questex, Lisa Hannant, Group CEO of Clarion Events, and Matthew Yorke, CRO of Foundry.  

Here are some key takeaways from the panel, which also covered key findings of our recent study, The State of Data-Driven Revenue Growth in Digital Information, Media and Events, conducted in partnership with JEGI/Clarity.  

Different Revenue Streams…All Driven by Data

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Although these companies have different mixes of revenue streams ranging from digital media, events to lead generation and data subscription services, they all are all finding new ways to use data to drive growth. And, their private equity partners have similar expectations when it comes to business performance and health.

1. Questex’s revenues are split about evenly between events and digital media, and their use of data is critical to driving growth across the organization. MidOcean Partners, their private equity investor, is expecting and investing in organic growth. Because of this, board meetings are heavily focused on data than they have ever been before. Board meetings revolve around customer and sales retention, market share, and the distribution of customers across various business models and products.
   
   Around five years ago, they kicked off a significant transformation by reorganizing their company into five distinct markets. These markets spanned an array of different industries, ranging from beauty marketing to life sciences..  Sales and marketing are now embedded within each vertical and other functions were moved to a Center of Excellence (CoE) that spans all their business sectors. Questex’s  CoE facilitates the sharing of effective strategies and data between different teams, fostering a collaborative culture and allowing the rapid sharing of successful practices across the organization.
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2. ‍For Clarion, live events contribute the majority of the revenue, with the remaining coming from media and marketing services for most portfolios. There are a few where there is an even split between events and media. Blackstone, Clarion’s private equity partner, expects value creation and business optimization across all business areas. The company has been using data to drive and meet customer expectations, especially during the post-pandemic era. Lisa uses the term customers to refer to the audience and attendees.
   
   Clarion believes that exceeding customer needs and expectations is the key to delivering greater value for brands marketing to them. To this end, Clarion has shifted resources from sales to specialized marketing, optimizing the audience experience and thereby improving lead generation and customer retention.This shift has resulted in huge amounts of data being generated, how that data is being packaged and presented to brands, and the skills and technology required to drive this transformation.
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3. ‍At Foundry, the vast majority of their revenue is from digital. And like Questex, they are using data more than ever before in team meetings, board meetings, forecasting and re-forecasting. Like Clarion, Foundry's private equity partner is Blackstone and is dedicated to driving profitable, sustainable, and predictable revenue growth, no small feat for a B2B digital media business. While Foundry’s mandate is to achieve value creation through various strategies - organic and inorganic, the Foundry team focuses primarily on organic growth to create greater value. To do this, they have to consistently and smartly use data to understand their business, customers, and future demand.
   
   To drive sustainable, predictable and profitable revenue growth, Foundry underwent a massive company wide business transformation starting with normalizing, standardizing and templating products on a global scale. They are shifting to globally generated products, and using data to discern which products to retain or discard based on sales velocity and retention rates. Meaningful comparison and evaluation of product data across the audience, advertisers, engagements, and content now empowers much deeper customer understanding and intimacy and  better, faster, scalable decisions that have a far greater impact.
   
   Foundry created a global sales and marketing organization reporting up to Matt, and who execute against a system of globally managed products. For example,  their events business is identical all over the world with the only thing changing is the number of attendees. Inventory management is also identical, which is a shift from some of the other B2B media companies I speak with who are using multiple inventory management systems across different brand portfolios and solutions. And, systems are unified and scaled across CRM, marketing automation, and other sales and marketing enablement platforms.
   
   One of the big data-driven outcomes that has a significant impact on revenue growth  is the ability to generate real-time, actionable, forward-looking reports and eliminate the “surprise” end of quarter close results. 
   
   Foundry is also implementing a Configure Price Quote (CPQ) system, a module inside the CRM, to regulate pricing, gain pricing power and boost revenue. 
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Carefully Monitor Churn 

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Our panelists’ companies are focused on reducing churn. According to our study, 71% of industry leaders feel that lowering customer churn will be a very or extremely important driver of growth for their company over the next 12 months. Yet, 8 in 10 say that doing so is challenging for their organizations.

How leaders on our panel are using data-driven approaches to improve customer retention.

• Foundry’s revenue data strategy and their investment in controlled, leading KPIs enables them to identify deal and customer risk across a few predictive factors: salesperson activity levels, customer purchasing trends, sales close cycles, and customer segment. Foundry measures churn at the country level and by product, and slices and dices the data by packing types, pricing levels, customer size and ACV. They use this information to understand their sweet spot and refine their product offerings which they can now do on a global basis. 
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• Questex is tackling churn prevention and renewals with a deep dive of data in CRM , which is used to forecast consistently. They focus heavily on renewals at shows and how those renewals measure against what happened “same time last year.” Questex incentivizes sales activities on renewals  to ensure high retention rates. On the audience side, like Clarion, there are some areas where you want churn to keep active buyer participants fresh and new to the exhibitors. Or, you want to make sure that attendees coming back have new buying needs. This is where data becomes the fuel behind Questex’s retention strategy. Questex uses data to deliver on contracts: what exhibitors and sponsors expect in terms of pipeline development and expectations.
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• Clarion uses churn data differently depending on the segment of their business. In their one-on-one matchmaking at events, they deliberately cycle through attendees to provide a new pipeline of buyers. Clarion is spending a great deal of time evaluating how to drive customer satisfaction levels on the audience side.  Every time they get an increase in NPS or CSAT, retention on the exhibitor side improves and pricing power is gained.  

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91% of leaders in information, media, and event companies face challenges in identifying & mitigating revenue risk before it happens

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Use Predictive Analytics to Drive Growth
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In our study, 62% of industry leaders said that identifying and mitigating revenue risks before they happen will be very or extremely important to their company’s growth in the next year. However, 9 in 10 felt that doing so was challenging for their companies.

The leaders on our panel are finding ways to make it happen.

For example, Foundry uses a global instance of Salesforce to gather accurate data and predictive analytics, identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities. This approach enables prescriptive advice for salespeople and insights into customer buying patterns. To be proactive, they monitor margins and KPIs, aiding in decision-making about which products to discontinue or promote based on the velocity of sales and gross retention.

Some say that “predictive analytics” is our middle name at H2K Labs (although that would be a mouthful). Our Insightify  platform, purpose-built for complex data needs of two-sided business models,  helps companies in our industry leverage data across CRM, financial systems, CDPs, marketing automation, customer success, inventory management, event technology AND many other systems to grow revenue and address risks before they happen.

‍Other Tips 

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Do a Deep Dive on Pricing

• Pricing power can be gained by adding value to customers but doing so in organizations with complex data environments and many offerings requires best of breed technologies.
• By leveraging CPQ and introducing small price increases, organizations can gain some revenue wins without disrupting customer relationships.
• Pricing strategies should consider market dynamics such as inflation and value delivered to customers, which is also a data-driven exercise.

Build a Data-Driven Organization with a 360 Degree Approach

• Create global product templates, customer journey maps, sales processes, leading KPIs that can be measured and used to drive predictive and prescriptive insights.
• Achieve better results by aligning marketing and sales teams wherever possible.
• Consider specialized marketing resources with deep market knowledge to improve lead generation and customer retention.
• Incentivizing customer success managers to own customer renewals can effectively reduce churn and increase customer retention.
• Remember that automation plays a crucial role in streamlining lead generation processes, ensuring priority leads are efficiently followed up, and establishing a unified approach across dispersed teams.
• Arm your teams with new capabilities. AI-powered tools can prescribe upsell and cross-sell opportunities, identify gaps, and enable data-driven decision-making for sales teams.

Focus on the "Three Cs" 

• Culture of Data-Driven Growth. Establish a collaborative culture within the organization to encourage cross-functional sharing of successful strategies and data-driven insights for driving revenue growth.
• Customer satisfaction: Relentlessly deliver high-quality customer and audience experiences (and leads) to reduce churn rates, increase customer retention, and strengthen pricing power.
• Continuously refine and analyze data. Regularly review and analyze data on customer preferences and the highest-value customer segments to enable personalized sales approaches.

By adopting these strategies, leaders can position their organizations for success in an increasingly competitive and data-driven business landscape. 

Recently, H2K Labs hosted the first Revenue Room™ Bootcamp focused on developing a single source of revenue truth in complex data environments. I invited Chad Rose, the CEO of Treehouse Technology Group (the developers of Insightify by H2K Labs, to join me and add more depth to technology and data-related discussion points.

The Revenue Room™  Bootcamp covered:

• The fundamentals of developing a single source of truth in your revenue organization
• Data-Driven Value Creation
• Steps to Develop a Single Source of Revenue Truth
• Potential landmines
• Tech and Tools

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The Problem

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Many companies think of themselves as data-driven. Many have invested in business intelligence technology and have hired data science teams. Despite these investments, many are still manually creating reports, do not have a single source of truth, and have not operationalized data across the organization. Revenue is being left on the table, and unnecessary money is being spent.

In industries like marketing services, encompassing media, events, digital information, and marketing intelligence, it becomes evident that the problem runs deeper.

1. NOT INVITED: The revenue organization was not invited to the data table. Many organizations we work with invested heavily in marketing and first party data, but for some reason, the side of the house in charge of selling was left high and dry.
2. FEAR OF CHANGE: Sales processes are often entrenched in outdated principles, held back by a pervasive fear of change. There seems to be an unwarranted belief that by modernizing revenue operations, we are threatening stability, inevitably affecting sales outcomes. Moreover, there's an apprehension about being exposed or held responsible for the results. However, let's confront the reality. When we have real-time insights into revenue, pipeline, customers, and product performance, it brings forth a heightened sense of accountability.
3. DATA-AWARE vs. DATA-DRIVEN: There is often a lot of confusion surrounding being data-driven. Simply using tools like Salesforce, Salesforce Revenue Intelligence Cloud, Domo, Tableau, or PowerBI does not automatically make you data-driven. True data-driven organizations have the ability to effortlessly generate accurate, predictive, and prescriptive forecasts, empowering their revenue-critical teams to sell better, sell faster, and ultimately, increase wallet share. Merely being data-aware is not enough; true data-driven success requires more.

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Today, if you're going to compete and thrive, becoming truly data-driven is a critical and vital part of your strategy. Data is the driving force behind all business decisions made today. Many organizations acknowledge that they need data. However, they don't structure their processes around using data effectively. Many companies silo their data, with each department operating with separate data and without communication. This results in massive inefficiencies and losses in revenue.

The answer to this problem is a data transformation strategy. And that has to start with developing a single source of truth.

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What is a single source of truth?

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A single source of truth (SSOT) is when all company data can be found on a centralized platform. At H2K Labs, we emphasize a subset of SSOT called a single source of revenue truth or SSORT. An SSORT strategy keeps all data connected to customers and revenue on a central platform.

The more complex your data asset is, the more key information can be lost due to a lack of communication and inefficiency. To acquire, retain, and grow revenues in a scalable and profitable fashion, revenue organizations must have an SSORT strategy at the center of their data strategy. 

In industries with high data liquidity and complexity levels, as exemplified by media, events, and , developing a single source of revenue truth requires unifying, cleansing, connecting, and blending data from inside and outside the CRM. It's no small effort. However, the benefits include:

• Macro view of customer engagement, revenue traction and predictive insights to help prepare for economic downturns or fluctuations
• Single view of the customer across divisions, brands, channels, and regions
• Real-time predictive analytics, especially around customer retention and expansion or the reverse, churn
• Identification of product, program, and contract performance risks in time to pivot and improve
• Data empowered sales teams to improve customer value proposition, deal activation, deal acceleration, and win rates

An SSORT strategy enables real-time value creation, data-driven decision-making, and waste reduction, enabling smoother operations and more efficient resource allocation.

Landmines to Avoid

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Maximizing the effectiveness of an SSORT strategy requires balance. Organizations with large and complex data sets must be intentional with the data they utilize. Executing an SSORT strategy isn't a one-time solution. It requires continuous improvement and evaluation to ensure the right data is not only collected and normalized but blended and curated to drive the insights required to achieve results. 

A few landmines discussed during the Bootcamp included:

• IT owning the data strategy
• Boiling the ocean and not using a Quick Win approach
• Wrong data in/wrong data out
• Taking a once-and-done approach
• Not gaining consensus/resistance to change
• Not identifying the “saboteurs” or blockers in the room

And there are more.

The group also discussed the importance of data democratization. Empowering all functional team members to use data to make decisions as part of daily workflow not only improves business outcomes but organically develops data literacy and skills. 

Studies, like the HBR 2023 Study for Google Cloud, show:

• 91 percent of organizations agree that democratizing access to data and analytics is vital for their success.
• 76 percent of organizations agree that democratizing access to AI tools is crucial.

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Tech & Tools

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The ultimate purpose of an SSORT strategy is to increase efficiency and maximize value creation. 

To achieve a successful SSORT strategy, the following platforms and tools are required:

• Data Warehouse
• ELT/RELT/Data Sanitizing
• Data Access & Data Management
• Display & Analysis(BI)
• Predictive(ML/AI)

These tools will help organizations save time, simplify the complexity of calculations, and provide support to staff.

In environments with significant data complexity, your goal should be to uncomplicate the data stack and find end-to-end solutions that offer Tesla-level capabilities and are built for business users like Insightify . 

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Understanding the value of data

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The strategy of winners is to capitalize on the data surrounding revenue, customer segments, product formats, brands, divisions, and distribution channels. An SSORT strategy will enable continuous value creation, increased profitability, and operational efficiency.

 Is your business ready to transform revenue growth and improve profitability through data-driven strategies? 

Please join us in The Revenue Room™ for our next Bootcamp, Using Predictive Analytics to Manage Risk and Capture Opportunity, on September 21, 2023, from 12-1 pm EST. We will discuss how predictive analytics is a valuable tool for revenue generation. 

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Discounting and Value-Add 

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Should you offer discounts or toss in a free value-added program to customers? In the old days, the right answer was, “Yes, customers expect it.” 

Today, depending on the sophistication of the revenue organization in the business, the answer ranges from “it depends,” to “only in very select cases.” While discounts still play a role in negotiation and driving up close/win rates, it is crucial to eliminate value-add from the narrative. More on that below.

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“If you have a 30% margin, and you give a 10% discount, you have to sell 50% more business to make the same profits.” 

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Media and event businesses must strive to grow the top-line by leveraging existing resources or, more ambitiously, by maximizing productivity while minimizing costs. Couple that with cost inflation from materials, technology, labor, travel, shipping, food & beverage, A/V, and venues, discounting and value-add are not friends of the business. 

In fact, a new more urgent discussion is taking place at forward-thinking events and media companies: how to gain pricing power, not how to erode it.

The friction between commanding higher prices for what we sell and discounting so we can close a deal creates a pretty interesting conundrum.

So how do you create more value and command higher prices while also managing discounting? How do you ensure that the old strategy won’t cannibalize the new one?

• Strict Governance
• Monitoring, Analysis and Measurement Using Data
• Management using Predictive Analytics

Governance & Data

In a well-governed revenue organization, discounting programs are carefully structured, documented, and transparent to both customers and sales teams. Smart sales and finance leadership teams monitor these programs closely using data. It is acknowledged that every dollar lost to discounts is a dollar that is subtracted from the margin. Moreover, the discounted amount still demands resources and cash be delivered to deliver the value promised to the customer.

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"Well-governed revenue organizations understand that mismanaged discounting destroys profits more than anything else." - Every CFO on the Planet

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Before I go into an example of governance and how to use data to monitor and measure, I need to make a personal plea.

Discounting can be a viable strategy if managed and monitored well. I hold an entirely different opinion about value-add. The value-add provision is a malevolence that must be expunged from all contracts as it unfailingly leads to unsatisfactory outcomes, reduces unit-level profitability and in some cases, materializes in a loss. I believe that anything given for free holds no value to the receiver of the value and as such, should not even be used to help drive demand for new products and solutions. Let’s ban value-add forever.

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“Value-add is the contract nuisance of the media and events industry. It destroys value and never delivers what it promises.”

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An Example Of Discounting Governance & Data

For the sake of brevity (am I ever brief?), I will give one example of discounting governance and how to use data to manage, monitor, measure and assess.

Scaled Contract Size

Customers could be offered discounts based on contract size.I am 50-50 on this and I imagine that it depends on the market you operate in. If value has truly been sold to me, am I really going to increase my spend because you are offering me a spend threshold discount? Not sure. But if the discounting program is offered, have strict governance around:

• Spend threshold levels
• What happens if the discount is offered and the spend level goes down at the 11th hour
• What happens if the spend level goes down via a partial cancellation after signed deal takes place
• What happens if the salesperson offers the discount and the threshold was not met via the initial contract aka maverick discounting

The word “scaled” is also important and should mean two things: 

1. You scale the discounts based on spend levels
2.  The discounts kick-in once the spend levels are met.

For example, if you offer discounts once a company hits 100K in spend, you would not discount the first 100K, OR the discount on the first 100K is minimal while the attractive part of the discount hits on the 101,000 spend mark. Why? Because in many cases in media and events, contracts can be canceled at any time and you wind up holding the revenue slippage.

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What this means for  your CRM, Order Systems, Financial Systems, Reporting, and Data Strategy

From a data perspective, this means your CRM, order systems and financial systems need to allow for discounting types and you need to have the ability to have an historical look-back across pipeline stages and changes in dollar levels and discounting types offered throughout the selling period. In the latter case, your CRM can’t help you and most business intelligence platforms can’t either. I am inserting a shameless plug here- Insightify by H2K Labs Ping me if you want to chat about it.

Using data analytics with predictive insights, create dashboards that tell you:

• Which salespeople are most effective at using the discount to grow initial deal size to what ends up in “closed/won”?
• Is discounting helping  or hurting salespeople and quota attainment?
• How is discounting impacting sales profitability?
• Which salespeople are abusing the program so you can quickly contain it? Use predictive alerts so you can stop this dead in its tracks.
• Is the discounting program doing what you want it to do: grow deal size, improve upsell, cross-sell and expansion, and speed up sales cycles?
• At what rate do customers who receive the initial discount in contract 1, renew?
• At which point in the sales cycle does the discounting program have the most effect? 
• For renewing customers who received the discounting program, do they continue to grow their spend? Do they renew faster?
• Which type of customer cohorts are most favorably responsive to the discounting program?

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The Net Net

I have lots of opinions about discounting and value-add. Kill value-add once and for all and create a highly governed discounting program that can be managed, evaluated, and measured using data. 

Challenge the old school status quo and get rid of frequency discounts especially on digital advertising. Don’t discount lead generation programs because this is where pricing power lies. If you are not selling monthly subscriptions, don’t offer “pre-pay” discounts either. And, for the love of all things heavenly, do NOT let sales reps offer discounts “just because.” It’s killing your business.

And of course, please use data. All the time.

Have you ever had a “if only I had known…” moment? Of course you have. We all do. From minor details like forgetting to bring an umbrella, to more significant tragedies, like that big family vacation you planned back for March of 2020. There’s a lot of uncertainty in life, and that can lead to some unhappy surprises. 

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Most of us console ourselves with self-inflicted platitudes like “hindsight is 20/20,” but that doesn’t usually prevent us from wishing we could turn that hindsight into foresight. We put up with the uncertainty because we don’t have any viable, effective alternative.

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But that’s not the way everyone does it. Astronauts don’t launch with their fingers’ crossed, for example (“That’s not how we deal with risk,” Chris Hadfield once put it). And the adage “No strategy survives first contact with the enemy” never stops military operations from attempting to prepare for, and manipulate, the outcome of every engagement.

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Which begs a few questions. Namely, are we “guessing” more than we need to? Is there a way to anticipate future outcomes better than we currently do? And, if improved forecast accuracy is possible, how do we achieve it?

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Dear reader, welcome to the wonderful world of predictive analytics.

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Sit-Rep on Predictive Analytics

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First, an answer in brief. An overview for all you “Too Long; Didn’t Read” enthusiasts, if you will.

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Your business generates a veritable dragon’s hoard of data on a daily basis. This includes data from customer interactions, market engagement, internal operations, revenue and financial metrics, and a whole lot more. And, if you operate in data complex environments such as media, events, marketing and business information sectors, multiply your data asset by three.

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This data can do more than just visualize the ebb and flow of recent bookings, billings, cash flow and profitability numbers. 

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It can highlight historical trends, identify less obvious points of success or failure, and—most importantly—help analysts develop predictive insights. Such “leading indicators” are the ultimate goal: allowing businesses to anticipate outcomes based on past and current circumstances.

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In short: predictive analytics can do for your business what a medical examination can do for a patient. By taking “vitals” and comparing them to both category averages and personal history, future diagnoses can be foreseen and prepared for. For both examples, this can lead to increased longevity, better health, and optimized performance when implemented correctly.

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The key is knowing how to go from “scheduling the physical” to “clean bill of health.”

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How “Blind Fire” and “Firing Solutions” Relate to Business Intelligence

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Ok, we’ve established that data can drive effective decisions that properly address risk factors and capitalize on opportunities. However, raw data doesn’t, by itself, directly translate into winning business strategies. Just because you have a spreadsheet full of revenue data doesn’t mean you’ll be hitting every target from this point forward.

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Even in military contexts, hitting a target isn’t always as simple as taking aim and pulling the trigger. In fact, military terminology distinguishes the use of weapons and munitions based on what you’re firing at, and whether you can see it:

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• Blind fire—firing inaccurately in the general direction of a target, usually from behind cover
• Direct fire—firing directly at a target within line-of-sight
• Indirect fire—firing directly at a target using targeting information from an external source

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Why are we throwing around military terms in an article about predictive business analytics? Because, like poorly aimed artillery, businesses that make decisions without accurate data are effectively launching large chunks of budget and resources at the wrong targets, often overlooking crucial but unseen objectives.

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The Analytics “Fog of War”

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Now, while militaries across the globe have been developing and refining their targeting systems for decades, businesses have only just started to benefit from the analytical equivalent of satellite imagery and laser-guided targeting. Digital technologies have made certain realities possible before professionals knew exactly how to use them for those purposes.

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Business analytics implementation happens on a bit of a spectrum. At one end, teams may be so in the dark about their own data that they don’t even know where to find it all, let alone start collecting it. As organizations become more data-aware, they may seek to aggregate their information, perhaps even standardize it into a Single Source of Truth (SSOT). 

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Virtually every business faces issues with data integrity, though. Inaccuracies, redundancies, incompatibilities, and formatting issues all prevent the data from being properly organized and utilized. That leaves a large gap between brands that are data-aware and those that are data-driven, and crossing it can prove prohibitively difficult. 

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Again, this is something that militaries have dealt with for ages. The term “fog of war” refers to the obscuring uncertainty created by the inherent chaos of the battlefield. Without reliable intel, the fog of war prevents commanders from knowing where resources and threats are positioned, where they’re going, and how to properly direct efforts to turn circumstances to their advantage.

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What’s true for military leaders is true for senior business management: it’s virtually impossible to manage or prepare for what you can’t see. 

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Gaining data awareness is the first step toward converting analytics from a diversion to a secret weapon, but it’s not the only step. You can’t simply print off a satellite photo and hand it to an artillery crew as a “firing solution.” And you likewise can’t hand a database full of yet-to-be-scrubbed information and expect your analytics team to turn it into prophetic industry forecasts.

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On the other hand, processing the data by hand to normalize it is a fool’s errand, especially if your end goal is real-time insights. 

To get what you want out of the data and your staff, you need something to amplify the power and impact of both. You need a force multiplier.

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Conclusion

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Here is the final caveat; “the rub,” as they say. Different organizations and different industries have different requirements for their analytics tools. 

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Some teams can be served perfectly well by the major players in the BI space, and more or less use the solution right out of the box. But some businesses have data environments too complex for these providers to adequately serve.

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Media companies, event organizations, marketing service providers, and similar enterprises with complex data environments typically need a number of functions that standard business intelligence platforms don’t offer. 

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For teams that need to accommodate two-sided business models, complex client databases that require external-facing access, or even simply reporting tools that can turn 30 different marketing and sales enablement channels into a single revenue report, more specialized tools are needed.

Dear Heather,

I'm writing from a mid-sized PE-owned B2B media company that needs to realize better margins fast. We generate revenue from traditional revenue streams such as digital advertising, print advertising, demand generation, conference sponsorship, and conference ticket sales.

We recently launched a first-party data solution called Pipeline Pal that allows customers to target prospects based on their ideal customer profile, buyer persona, and data enrichment using a combination of first-party purchase intent data that we generate through site visitor behaviors and third-party data from Bombora.

Pipeline Pal is a vital strategic investment for us. It fulfills new customer demands, boosts customer spending, and enhances our competitiveness. Moreover, it will significantly improve our company valuation upon exit.

Here’s the rub.

• Our business and technology systems are geared to support the traditional revenue streams, and we are hacking those systems and processes to support Pipeline Pal.
• Pipeline Pal requires significant data governance, cleansing, and enrichment; it must happen in real-time. Currently, our time from lead initiation to delivery is seven business days. Our competitors are doing this in a matter of minutes.
• 90% of our Pipeline Pal customers also purchase other programs from us, including event sponsorship, digital advertising, and newsletter marketing. They are receiving disconnected reports about each program and we are receiving customer complaints about the workload this puts on them to unify their full scope of leads and investment ROI.
• Our budget cannot support the additional headcount we will need to scale if we continue to hack our way through this.
• And, of course, there are significant data privacy issues and risks when delivering leads to our customers via spreadsheets.

Our current process is the following: Lead data is generated and housed across various systems, including Swoogo, Gleanin, Brella, various lead scanning and location apps, Ad Orbit, Google Ad Manager, GoToWebinar, SailThru, CredSpark, Hubspot, Balluun and Omeda.

We manually export, clean, dedupe, and append the data using Google Sheets and BigQuery before uploading it into Looker Studio, where our clients view program results. Enriched leads are delivered via spreadsheet by our account managers. This requires significant human effort, especially the data cleansing and governance that our customers demand. One headcount can handle about 25 accounts, which is not scalable based on our growth projections and required margins and will lead to customer issues and production constraints.

What do we do?

Help!

Flummoxed With Data

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Is an Off-the-Shelf Solution the Answer?

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Dear Flummoxed With Data,

Congratulations on launching your first-party data solution, Pipeline Pal; it's the right step in future-proofing your media business and improving your company's valuation. However, with most data monetization initiatives, new challenges arise, especially around the tech stack, internal processes, and skill sets. There is a lot to unpack, but thankfully, there are solutions to the multiple issues you describe.

Let’s attack the data problem first.

On the one hand, you have the comfort of the known – your current systems, albeit with their limitations, and because you have a private equity partner, improving margins is top of mind. Investing in new technology is not high on the list of investment priorities.

However, without automating the process, improving data hygiene and governance, and handling data more securely, you are putting Pipeline Pal, your customers, your revenue, and your business at risk.

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You also do not have the internal skills to develop a system, nor should you. That's high risk, expensive, and unsustainable for a company your size.

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The hard truth is that you cannot scale without investing in an off-the-shelf solution. You need an off-the-shelf solution that:

• Unifies all of your campaign data across all of your marketing channels, including websites, email, newsletters, webinars, and live events
• Automates data hygiene, governance (yours and your customer's), and enrichment across 1st and 3rd party channels
• Provides your customers with seamless access to real-time comprehensive campaign reports and insights
• Delivers cleansed, governed, and enriched leads in real-time, preferably using a secure portal and/or API that connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, and other CRM systems

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Now let’s talk ROI.

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As with any technology investment, there must be a quick time to pay back and a clear understanding of what success looks like. The ROI and cost-benefit analysis I recommend to justify an investment in an off-the-shelf solution combines top and bottom-line impact.

Impact on Customers & Revenue

This is the top priority when it comes to evaluating ROI. How will this investment help my business grow, gain a competitive advantage, and turn sellers and customer success managers into revenue ninjas and value creators versus report generators?

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KPIs You Will Want to Consider

CSAT

‍Measure customer satisfaction before launch. Start measuring quarterly, particularly with customers purchasing demand generation, after launch. Customers benefit from faster ROI, reduced lead management and campaign reporting workload, and proactive campaign performance improvement.

ACV

‍Measure average and annual contract values to showcase increased annual spending and contract sizes. Customers who invest across various channels (website, email, newsletters, events, custom/sponsored research) achieve higher returns on investments with your company.

Unified reporting and analytics empower sales and customer delivery teams to provide real-time ROI proof to customers. It covers multi-channel and multiple brands.

Win Rate

‍Measure win rates and how those increase. Measure win rates in competitive selling environments as well.

A distinct competitive advantage is providing customers with real-time automated lead delivery and a  unified view of integrated campaign performance.

Churn/NRR

‍Measure churn as well as net revenue retention. Net revenue retention is a clear leading indicator of churn risk.

Offering unified reporting with automated data cleansing, verification, appending, and enrichment in real-time enhances your contract delivery rate. Real-time leads (within 15 minutes) enable clients to act faster, increasing the likelihood of pipeline conversion, customer satisfaction, and improved retention.

Time to Revenue

‍Measure sales cycles or time to revenue. By empowering salespeople and custom delivery teams with real-time data, sales cycles should contract improving cash flow and quota attainment rates.

When sellers and customer success teams are empowered with real-time program performance data, they can create value for customers better and sell faster.

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Costs & Employee Value Creation

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A second measure is cost savings and/or resource optimization. With an off-the-shelf solution, you can anticipate needing fewer resources to assemble reports, unify data, cleanse, dedupe, enrich, append, and deliver proof of performance. Those resources can be reallocated to revenue-producing activities and creating customer value.

Employee Headcount in Customer Delivery & Reporting Organizations

‍How many employees do you have on the customer delivery and data teams to support advertising and demand generation campaigns? How many will you need as you grow and launch Pipeline Pal?

You will need significantly fewer employees to generate and deliver campaign reports to customers by eliminating manual work effort.

Accounts per Customers Delivery FTE

The number of accounts each headcount can handle will increase by automating the full cycle customer delivery journey.

Revenue per Customer Delivery FTE

By transitioning Customer Delivery employees from report generators to value creators and increasing the number of accounts that can be handled per head, revenue per employee will increase.

The Net Net

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Once you have considered the off-the-shelf solution, calculated time to payback, and ROI, you will need to evaluate and change internal processes and customer journey mapping and ensure your internal and external stakeholders are not only trained on how to use the platform but also how to optimize and create value through it.

Let me know if you want to discuss specific off-the-shelf solutions we have worked with. I am happy to help with the internal processes and other changes that will be required.

Here to serve,

Heather

PS - May I suggest another name other than Pipeline Pal? It makes me giggle every time I say it.

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