Analytics for the Masses
There is some pretty useful point-of-view provided by McKinsey in a late May posting on the Computerworld site. The article explains three sources of common data that can lead toward insight regarding levers for improving sales effectiveness. The research is pretty sound and the best news is that the data sources are common for any company with a large sales force or set of channel partners.
The problem is that if they had not performed the research to point out these best practices for utilizing analysis to uncover better sales actions, you might not know it. However, you may still have somebody crunching a lot of numbers anyway. This is the problem with the new BI. Analytics tools are getting easier to come by and landing on more and more laptops across the enterprise. Crunching numbers has gotten easy, but the trick to crunching effectively is asking the right questions.
You may have people generating reports based on sophisticated calculations that lead to erroneous conclusions. This happened to me early in my career when I was running a training function for management development. We were using SAS to generate reports for managers based on 360 degree competency surveys. Unfortunately, due to an error in the report set up, the tool spit out random numbers. Because a large number of people were participating in the overall data collection and reporting process it was caught before doing too much damage. However, when individuals are given really powerful analytical tools and are not correctly schooled in their use, the same random results can lead to dicey decision making.
So, the salient term in that last sentence is “correctly schooled”. If you are going down the BI path, which is a great idea due to the rewards at the end of the path, take the correct measures to ensure that your ROI is as great as the software vendors promote. Even a little education will go a long way.