The Marketing Leaders - Decision-making: Gut feelings, facts and figures

People are demanding, of others as well as of themselves, time as a resource is limited, but data volumes are growing; so how do you take advantage of it?

In my job I meet a lot of people in marketing positions, who have reasonable education. Even if the decisions these people are required to make and the tasks they have to perform have not changed dramatically over the past years, they experience an ever-growing shortage of time. This comes from the fact that these people are demanding. Demanding of others as well as demanding of themselves. They decide and act on the basis of facts and figures supported by gut feeling. Now the availability of data has never been as great as it is today. So in order to come to an informed decision more data needs to be analysed, more information needs to be digested.

Unfortunately the availability of data is most likely to grow over the coming years. So unless these people want to be swamped in facts so badly that eventually every professional decision making process is next to impossible they will need to find a way to take advantage of the availability of data without being terrorised by them.

Enter the marketing dashboard. A solution to all their problems. Just plug it in and you’ll see sales go up, you’ll find you have more time for your family, friends and hobbies. Look at the attractive interface. I come to work log on to my dashboard and all is well. Right. It would be nice but alas it isn’t so.

Marketing Dashboard: a time-saver

What a good marketing dashboard can be however is a valuable time-saver. It can give you a clear overview of current and historical data, reducing the amount of time to reach the same informed decision you would have taken longer to reach without it. It may lead to better decisions by revealing correlations between previously unconnected data. The fact that all information is coming together in a single environment makes analysis a much more pleasant job. So a part of idyllic picture of the marketing dashboard might be true after all.

What many people don’t realise is the amount of work it takes to get there. For companies that take their marketing seriously there is good news. If your processes are well thought through, enabling them in a dashboard is not rocket science. And if your processes are good, you’ll probably have a keen understanding of the key performance indicators per process. Again, what you already have, a couple of programmers with some experience can translate to a valuable addition to your dashboard. Fortunately the majority of processes nowadays are already in the systems. Procurement, HRM, finance, sales and logistics software are being used by most companies. Even so, quite often the close scrutiny that processes are under in a situation like this can lead to re-evaluation.

So you have all this information, but you already had this information - although not in the same amounts as years ago. The difference to the same information a couple of years ago is the fact that the data from many systems can be made available in one format. Where in the past a lot of systems generated output in a proprietary format with it’s own reporting and analysis tools, nowadays most systems will be able to generate XML. XML has been around for a decade but over the past five or so years has taken off. Most of you will know what it is. For those that don’t, it is an open standard for exchanging structured documents and data over the Internet. These data can be visualised in a marketing dashboard.

Good data visualisation goes beyond eye-candy. It is a direct result from your understanding what information to look for and creating a tool that will take some weight of your shoulders, to do some of your filtering. There are quite a few tools out there that will do this for you. In some cases it may have a wealth of features you don’t need, or may be missing just a couple.

What a good marketing dashboard will do for you is visualise available data in a dynamic way. The dashboard should allow interaction. You should be able to zoom in on information to see it in detail. You should be able to share relevant data with different groups in an easy way. You should be able to compare current data and historical data and should alert you to possible correlations between events. In my opinion a good tool should allow you to add datastreams. Even external ones as far as I’m concerned. So that what happens at competitors, partners, prospects and customers all can be indexed and viewed, to a degree, from this single point. See further than others by creating the giant whose shoulders you can stand on.

As almost every system that is developed today is web-enabled the integration of data into a dashboard will not be the challenge. What will be? Combining your new tools with your existing skills. Be creative. Overthrow the tyrannical data regime, use the data.

The challenge for people developing dashboards is not to get stuck in dashboards. Dashboards may have an evolutionary future of being cockpits. Where the marketer is not just watching the gauges and meters but actually is in the pilot seat. And just when a developer thinks he’s got it, Microsoft will integrate it into Office 2010. They have a lot of parts of the puzzle already. And obviously Google’s going to offer it for free. But that should take a couple of years.



		Decision-making: Gut feelings, facts and figures
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