TMAI #210: Be Indispensable: Obsess About Analytics Outcomes.

If the Analytics Evangelists of the world, and I, are remotely impactful then you are likely spending more money on your Analytics program.

You've hired more people (the 10-90 rule baby!). You've procured more sophisticated free and paid analytics tools. You've hired a really savvy analytics agency to fill your company's think gaps. You've invested in the devastatingly overlooked areas of governance and process optimization.

All this costs money.

Even if you are a small business and only do some of the above, percentage-wise it is still a lot of money for you.

It should be entirely unsurprising then that when a meaningful amount of money is being spent... Accountability comes a-knocking.

The Problem.

For Analytics programs (people + tools + process) that demand for accountability is often met by the following metrics:

Number of reports being published.

Percentage of analysis delivered on time.

Growth in data warehouse queries.

Number of meetings with Senior Leaders.

Tool rollouts completed.

Percentage of budget savings in vendor renegotiation.

Training sessions successfully delivered with 90%+ attendees saying they will recommend the training to other employees.

NPS for Analytics team.

Etc. Same spirit as above. Yada. Yada.

They are all wrong.

Too harsh perhaps.

Let me buy myself some breathing room (as a leader of an Analytics program!).

These are all insufficient.

All of the above metrics, except one, measure analytics-created activity.

What the analytics team did in the production of their work.

None of them, except maybe one, measure analytics-driven outcomes!

Sad.

What matters, in the end, is the impact on the company of all that analytical activity.

Did the company make more money?

Were more campaigns successful?

Did the company cut more budget in the losers it has been riding all these years?

Did your testing program drive change in how money was being spent / landing pages being created / creatives being produced in the future?

If you are measuring activity you might get away with it for a while in the CIO / CTO org because their reason for being is to ensure lights are on and infrastructure is running (which is important).

If you are measuring activity in any business function (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, etc.) then your Analytics program will remain small and non-influential. In fact, it will be the first thing on the chopping block the moment times get tough.

Obsess about the outcomes delivered by your work as an Analyst. It is good for the company, it is good for your professional growth, and it is good for the universe.

Behavioral Signs You Make Data Matter.

It might seem unfair to ask you to obsess about outcomes.

After all, you are just the data person. You just look at the data and provide reports/slides. That is what you learned how to do well at school, in the jobs you've held since.

(Do note that the reason you were always miserable in the aforementioned activity-centric analytics jobs is that you never felt in your soul that anything analytical you did really mattered.)

It is unfair with all other people, layers, bureaucracy, people, teams, agencies, hidden agendas, political sniping, leadership posturing, that you, the poor analyst, has to obsess about action being taken based on data.

But, if not you then whom?

To bring purpose to your work, joy to your heart, care about business outcomes driven by the analytics program.

Obsessing about outcomes means your actual work starts after all the data has been collected, processed, reported, and analyzed.

The job of influencing leaders and departments to listen to data starts.

The challenge of ensuring your teams, agencies, leaders all agree on what the data is showing becomes a focus.

The arguments where you gingerly start to say respectfully, that's just your opinion as the facts don't bear that out become exhibitions of your bravery on behalf of data.

The hard work of identifying what processes are most influential and where in those processes to give data a voice becomes critical.

Putting toll gates and checkpoints before the money is greenlit takes up a lot of your time (and the Finance team becomes your BFF!).

Creating reflections for your senior-most leaders that create an incentive for them to cause behavioral changes in their direct reports and teams becomes a big obsession with you.

Reading books on behavioral economics and psychology is an important part of your investment in becoming a better Analyst - not because it will teach you R, but because it will teach you how to influence people!

And so on, and so forth.

You become the absolute Master Dragon of ensuring action gets taken on the data - to the fullest extent of insights held inside the data.

Because, that drives outcomes. Business outcomes.

Because, that solves for the reason you birthed all that data. To change the world (of your business).

The Solution:

For all the reasons in section two, the metrics that measure the impact of your Analytics program are outcome metrics. These include:

Profit delivered.

Revenue driven by Analytics Do-Now, Do-Later recommendations.

(Bonus read: Care-Do-Impact storytelling framework.)

(Change in) % of Budget behind pre-tested passed creatives.

(Change in) % of Budget that met media minimums.

Increase in conversion rates from LPO.

% of Campaigns exceeding pre-set KPI targets.

Increase in retention rates (/reduction of churn).

(fine, you can have this) NPS of the Analytics team.

Every one of these measures the impact on the business and not just that the Analytics team worked really, really hard, on a lot of things, that threw out a lot of data.

That is how you the Analyst knows that you matter in a way very few people in the company do.

And, you sleep like a happy well-fed baby every single night.

Bottom-line: There is zero doubt that data and analytics matter for your company. Yet, their mere existence is nothing more than empty calories - a whole lot of bluster and bravado with nothing to show for it. What I'm advocating for is hard, and new. I'm afraid it is the only way to matter to your company... The only way to joy from your analytics work.

Are you in the data production business, or changing your business business?

-Avinash.

PS: If you wanted a more mathy way of measuring incremental success driven by your analytics team AND you wanted a downloadable spreadsheet to plug in your numbers... Well, today is your lucky day...