Creating a Culture of Data-Driven Decision Making 

Data has a better Idea

Blog

Oct 05, 2018

StellarAlgo

Read time: 2 mins

It’s been decided. Data driven organizations are over 20 percent more profitable than those that aren’t. Why? A lot of it boils down to having a culture that is hungry for new knowledge and is looking for constant self-improvement in pursuit of their mission. For a lot of our clients, this mission likely involves the relentless pursuit of providing the best possible experiences to your universe of world’s greatest fans.

As an aside, StellarAlgo believes in using our customer data platform to help clients discover, understand and connect with their fans in order to create the world’s best experiences, for the world’s greatest fans.

In order for us to collectively realize our goals, it’s going to take more than just a great product. It’s going to take a data-driven culture of inspired individuals coming together to take in more data, synthesize that into actionable information, take action, understand the results. Rinse, recycle, repeat. Having a defined process and some pillars around how and where you use data in your day-to-day will yield maximum results for your business and maximum adoption of your Customer Data Platform.

Here are the steps that are important to create a culture of data-based decision-making:

1 – Assess the Current State of Your Organizational Culture:

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do you have core values that align with your mission and overall excellence?

  • How much are you encouraging new ideas and open communication?

  • Are you making time for strategy and planning?

2 – Set Accountabilities:

Having a data champion in your organization is a great start. This is by no means a full-time job but making someone accountable for adoption will help encourage adoption by sharing interesting blog posts, monitoring usage, gathering feedback, socializing interesting findings, and training.

3 – Establish and Communicate Goals:

Setting goals and aligning strategies ahead of the season will not only give your organization and personnel direction, it will also set the bar from which to measure yourself when leveraging insights in your platform. Questions like:

  • How are we pacing versus last season?

  • How are we pacing to goal?

  • How are our retention touchpoints measuring up?

    • Retention touchpoint measurables like ‘Which of my accounts have subscribed to our newsletter?’ are important to supporting organizational success.

4 – Create Structure for Data-Driven Conversations:

Creating a lightweight meetings calendar with key personnel to strategize around trends always seems to reveal new opportunities, new questions and incremental value. We recommend creating an organizational scorecard, making one specific employee accountable for each item and then visiting your progress each week. Bonus points if you have a TV in your boardroom where you can bring up your CDP in support of new ideas and strategies during your meetings. Analyzing this data as a collaborative group at least once a week can result in exciting new campaigns, customer lists and a renewed focus on upcoming events and locations where distressed or underserved opportunities exist.

5 – Follow and Disseminate Content on Actioning Data:

This will help your team learn and educate themselves on best practices in data driven sales and marketing principals. We are biased, but our blog and social resources are a great place to start.

6 – Bring Feedback and Push Your Tech Partners:

Your technology relationships are becoming increasingly important to the way you do business. Your feedback is paramount to ensuring that they understand the business pain points you are trying to solve and how future development can help with this. Building a collaborative relationship where you understand their goals, capabilities and priorities is in some ways equally as important to the other way around.

7 – Test and Learn:

Your culture shouldn’t be afraid to test and learn. This means accepting a certain level of failure, with an end goal in mind of the greater good and long-term constant improvement. The enemy, and what is sure to slow your business in this dynamic and modern world, is resistance to change. Testing and learning cannot be blind though – that’s the learn part. Having systems in place to measure your tests and inform adjustments to future efforts will ensure that your organization is constantly evolving and that your staff are pushing themselves to improve from the status quo. Plus testing and learning is fun!

Understand that data is an important tool to help you both stay accountable internally while also providing the extra that can help significantly improve strategy and execution of sales and marketing activities. Data is not a substitute for a well aligned and efficient organization, but it does play an important role in helping with just how effective you can be.


Do you have any questions about how your organization can be more data driven, or if StellarAlgo could be a good CDP for you? Reach out today via info@stellaralgo.com or on twitter @StellarAlgo.

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