Data Assessment For Strategic Insights

Challenge

An agricultural crop protection manufacturer was looking to determine how their internal data sources could help inform strategic business decisions for the upcoming crop year. The company had been collecting customer and product sales data consistently for a few years but an assessment of the quality and completeness of the data had never been reviewed.

In order to be successful, the company would need to overcome a series of challenges.

Approach

In order to address these challenges in the requested timeline and gain insights quickly, SIGMA recommended an initial data assessment. The objective of the data assessment was to align the company’s key internal data sources to identify insights that the CEO could present at the upcoming board meeting and provide recommendations to leverage those insights to inform future strategies.

Initially, SIGMA Data Scientists reviewed the internal data sources for quality, completeness, and cleanliness. The team worked to align the disparate data sources based on commonalities and unique identifiers to gain initial insights.

Following the initial data work, the team conducted a virtual workshop with company stakeholders. The purpose of a workshop is to allow SIGMA team members the opportunity to share initial findings and for company stakeholders to lend knowledge to outstanding questions. This also allows for a discussion to determine if additional data is available to assist with filling in any gaps.

Results

The data assessment provided the company with a realistic view of the current state of their data along with data-driven insights. Insights shared at the annual board meeting focused on:

Additional insights gleaned from the data assessment showed areas that required a plan of action to address potential issues related to lack of data and customer attrition.

The data assessment showed:

Lack of data: Although the company had been collecting sales data for 2-3 years, the data was not consistent and was only being collected from a small number of distributors. The SIGMA team completed an analysis on the data provided but the data available was not representative of the overall business.

Based on this finding, SIGMA provided a strategy for acquiring additional data that could be incorporated into the current data set for a more complete view. These recommendations included outreach to distributors to collect monthly sales data and investment in external market and competitive data sources.

Customer Attrition: From the data that was available, the SIGMA team was able to determine that at the end of Q2 of the current year, 30% of customers that had made a purchase the previous year, had not yet made a purchase in the current year. An analysis of customer sales data showed that over 50% of those customers that had not made a purchase in the current year were associated with the same distributor. In addition, 30% of those non-repeat customers had previously purchased the same product.

These insights prompted SIGMA to work with company stakeholders to develop a plan for a more in-depth customer performance analysis. Additional analysis would help the team to:

  • Understand the reasons for attribution and help inform engagement moving forward
  • Determine commonalities among those customers who did not have repeat purchases to understand potential attrition drivers (location, product/technology, purchase timeframe, distributor)
  • Communicate findings to sales teams with a plan for outreach to distributors to collect information (calling campaign, email campaign, onsite visits)

The initial data assessment conducted by SIGMA, provided the company with a clear path forward in terms of current state, recommendations for data collection, and produced valuable customer insights that required additional analysis to potentially win-back sales for the current year.

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Starting Your Data Journey

Business Challenge

The decision to begin investigating and using your company’s data to gain insights is one that can lead to immense ongoing benefits, but beginning a data journey can be a significant undertaking. For most organizations at the beginning of this journey, data is scattered throughout your organization in different formats, within different systems, being managed by different departments. The overwhelming question in most cases is “Where do we even start?”

Many data and analytics firms will push you toward building a data mart to house all your data, and although that may be the best solution down the line, the price tag that accompanies a truly well-structured data mart isn’t going to help your ROI this year. Maybe you’re thinking progress is progress but will you feel that way when you’re convincing your stakeholders and leadership team to approve additional budget for your data journey next year? What will you say when they ask to see the progress that has been made and you have very little to immediately show for it?

SIGMA Approach

In order to get to ROI and insights quickly, SIGMA always recommends an initial data assessment. The objective of the data assessment is to explore your organization’s key data sources to identify business insights and recommendations related to leveraging data to inform future strategies.

An initial data assessment allows SIGMA to analyze the quantity, completeness, consistency, and cleanliness of data sources while also producing actionable insights related to customers, product/service activity, and a thorough analysis of your organization’s contact data.

Data-Driven Results

Once an initial data assessment is complete, the SIGMA team will work with your organization to:

  • Define key metrics/KPIs
  • Provide a recommended approach to data standardization
  • Advise on additional analyses that could lead to deeper insights
  • Recommend supplemental data sources to add to your data set

The data assessment approach to starting your data journey provides your organization with a realistic view of the current state of your data and a tailored approach for moving forward.

Immediate insights provide your team with the ability to strategize and leverage findings to convince stakeholders of the value that a data journey can offer.

In addition, unlike the prospect of taking on a data mart build which can take months with costs ranging from $50,000-$500,000, a data assessment with SIGMA can typically be completed within 60 business days with a budget of $5,000-$15,000.

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Adam Smith Speaks at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference

Check out Adam Smith delivering a great presentation on “Data and Machine Learning Worth your Time and Money”. Adam gave this speech at the American Banking Association’s 2018 Bank Marketing Conference in Baltimore, Maryland on September 24th. In this video he explores such customer segmentation, customer profiling and predictive modeling. He, also, wrote this blog on the same topic.

 

 

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Jump Start Your Bank’s Data-Driven Marketing Program

Data has been the buzzword de jour over the last five years. Still, most banks haven’t moved beyond data being “nice to have.”

On September 24th, SIGMA Data Scientist, Adam Smith, will be speaking at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference in Baltimore and giving a presentation about Data and Machine Learning Worth Your Time and Money. Data is big and messy, but this session will help you understand a few key areas of focus and how you can become a more data-driven marketing leader within your organization. In his presentation, Adam will discuss five strategies to jump start your data-driven marketing program, as they are outlined below:

  1. Profiling and Base-lining – Append demographic data of existing customers to better understand those you are doing well with and those you are not.  Also look at key metrics to identify baselines and trends.
  2. Customer Segmentation – Did you know you can use generic segments from Experian, Nielsen, etc. or create your own? Either way the segments can help better target marketing.
  3. Smarter, Deeper Analysis – By applying the results of steps one and two, banks can more easily identify better cross-sell targets.
  4. Dashboards and Reporting – Once you start to become more data-driven you’ll notice the request for reports will increase.  Creating dashboards that are connected to live data has several benefits including creating a single source of truth and allowing end users to identify more insights than static reports.
  5. Modeling and Prediction – Once you understand your customers, have made some wins with targeted cross-sell, and have your dashboards set up, it’s time to move on to predictive modeling.  Predictive models combine many variables related to demographics and behavior into one simple score that can be used to guide your marketing efforts.  They use advanced statistical techniques to identify those who are most likely to become a customer, buy a particular product, or close an account.  Once you have this information in hand, you can act on it to improve acquisition and retention, while deepening customer relationships.

Come join us in Baltimore to learn how to get started, hear specific success stories, and have the opportunity to ask questions applicable to your organization.  After the session is over come up and say hello—We look forward to meeting you!