The Importance of Empirical vs. Anecdotal Data

“I want our team to get better, but we seem to be plateauing every month.” This is what a sales leader said to me in our first meeting to discuss applying data analytics to his business. For context, he was leading a sales office of 15 responsible for lead generation in the financial industry. Over the course of an hour, it became clear that they were running the business based almost solely on anecdotal data. Their idea of what a typical client looked like in terms of organizational revenue, industry, job title, age and gender was based on preconceived notions and guesswork. From experience, this is unbelievably commonplace in business and usually leads to lost potential revenue.

The approach we took to solve this was to look at their current client list, prospect list and transactional data for the last five fiscal years. In doing so, we were able to establish the following using empirical data:

• Which industries had the greatest need for the specific financial services this business offers.
• What demographics have the same needs – based off of organizational revenue, job title, geography, age and gender.
• Which client types – based off of the parameters in the above two bullet points – bring the most lifetime revenue to the business.

You might be asking why this exercise was not done by this business sooner internally. Unfortunately, this business had client, prospect and financial data in three different systems that did not directly interface with one another. However, we were able to find a solution utilizing SQL to pull the data together and not lose data integrity. Finally, we were able to put this data into a live Tableau dashboard that updated real-time. This could be distributed to the entire sales office in an interactive and intuitive way that was user-friendly.

The key takeaways for this business were that they were ignoring industries – particularly agriculture and food & beverage – and organizations with smaller annual revenue to their own detriment. The empirical data we gathered showed that those clients were driving the bottom line of their business. As a result, they were able to take this data and modify their approach toward marketing and lead acquisition. We were happy to hear that this research and dive into data helped them achieve a strong finish to their fiscal year and a record revenue result, as well.

Contact us today to find out how we can partner with your business to achieve similar outcomes.