'We're not going to make our revenue target for the fiscal year,' declared our customer, a Director of Customer Insights at a global technology company.;

She followed with, 'I was barely holding on to key resources this year, and now my budget's taking another hit!'  I could tell she was feeling tired and discouraged.
 
After listening a bit more I asked, "What customer analytics could your leadership team use right now that would help close some of the revenue gap, and at the same time demonstrate your team's value?" 

She said, "Last quarter the sales team asked us to conduct a lead aging analysis, which identified some opportunities with the greatest likelihood to convert in the next quarter. They found this very helpful and they are running with it."  I said, "That's great!"
 
Keeping her team's charter in mind, which is to rank and profile customers by critical dimensions, such as revenue, lifetime customer value, and profitability I returned to my initial question, "What are the burning questions about customers that the leadership team is asking?" Her response, "I don't know."
 
This is a common scenario. With scarce resources, it's often difficult to get ahead of need – to be proactive in creating value from data. So, we began to brainstorm the kinds of things the leadership team might want to know to help improve the revenue situation. 

Since time is of the essence, some of the ideas we discussed revolved around purchase intent behaviors, channels, and touch points that would facilitate near-term revenue generating opportunities.
 
After we explored the possible questions, I mentioned a customer analytics study that had been conducted not long ago by Aberdeen.

The study found that Best-in-Class organizations that leverage customer analytics have a:

• 35% year over year increase in average order value
• 43% year over year increase in annual revenue
• 42% year over year increase in customer profitability,
• 25% year over year increases in market share growth.

With that in mind, I asked her whether her organization uses metrics such as profit margin, customer value, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition (quantity, cost and time dimension) to measure the value of her group.

She said, "No, we just measure our output, time to delivery of requests, and budget." I suggested she might want to take a look at these other more outcome-based metrics.
 
As we closed the conversation, she had some new ideas on how to proceed and how to measure the value of her team.

Just as importantly, she acknowledged that perhaps she and her team may have become too reactive in their analytics and reporting, and that they needed to take the lead by using segmentation, predictive modeling, and data analysis to provide business leaders with direction. In today's environment, many marketers feel they aren't at liberty to take action.
 
Our motto, "better to ask for forgiveness than permission."

Laura Patterson is president and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, Inc., a recognized leader in enabling organizations to leverage data and analytics to facilitate marketing accountability. Laura's newest book, Marketing Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance-Driven Marketing Organization (Racom: www.racombooks.com ), is a useful primer for improving marketing measurement and performance.

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