Allison Hartsoe: Empowering Companies with Customer Data Insights to Drive Growth

Ambition Data is a new hybrid customer analytics solution provider that humanizes the power of data for consumer brands, empowering them to elevate their customer experience and build long-term loyalty. Ambition Data combines their proprietary technology platform, Rubano, with world-class services to unify fragmented customer data and identify opportunities within it to save costs and unlock revenue for their clients.

Allison Hartsoe is a serial entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of Ambition Data. Allison is also the host of the Customer Equity Accelerator Podcast, where she talks with leaders from Wharton, MIT, and Google, who are driving the customer-centric revolution to deliver better bottom-line impact.

Sculpting Effective Leadership

For Allison, her unique perspective comes from a combination of experiences working for and founding start-ups as well as working within larger companies. She found that the velocity of growth within start-ups with the "most fast and break things" culture is inspiring and terrifying to larger companies. Allison believes that her perspective and respect for both cultures help bridge this gap from the strategic to the tactical through customer data. Customer data is a point of commonality and an opportunity for leadership because every company cares about its customers, yet no single internal group owns the customer.

She has enjoyed speaking with publications like MIT Technology Review, Forbes.com, Chief Executive Magazine, Information Management, and the Portland Business Journal about digital leadership through Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Before Ambition Data, Allison was a Senior Manager at EY, which resulted from an acquisition. Allison was also the VP of Analytics at Semphonic, the acquired company, where she executed digital strategies for Genentech, Nike, Kohler, GSK, and Intel.

Before Semphonic, she founded Aspyro, a business-analysis technology that used proprietary algorithms to help eBay power sellers get the best return on their investment.

And before Aspyro, Allison co-founded iSyndicate, a venture-backed Silicon Valley company that sold digital content to Fortune 500 corporations. The company grew to 230 employees with six domestic and three international offices before being acquired by a Berkshire Hathaway company.

Winning over Gender Resistances

As a young woman in the board room, Allison faced many challenges of her age and gender. Sometimes those were inappropriate comments, and sometimes she was left out of meetings where she should have been included. Through these challenges, however, she found a fabulous solution to shift the focus. One of the most powerful strategies Allison employed as an executive woman in the board room is "echoing." She initially noticed this communication pattern with a colleague who used her name in meetings frequently. Then Allison learned there were more examples of this, notably from the women on President Obama's cabinet. She explains that "echoing" works when a person voices a solution or a good idea, and the conversation proceeds. Then, another executive calls out the idea, and the group circles back to it. She elaborates, "It sounds something like this, 'I think Allison's point about the most effective approach to digital transformation is quite strong, and I'd like to follow up on that.'" This nod of approval from the team raises one's status as an executive to be heard and included. It also keeps good ideas from slipping away. Allison likes to think that no one succeeds alone, and this is the proof.

Emulating the role of a Transformational Leader

Allison believes that transformational leadership is an exercise in change management. By comparison, it is easy to hire people and check off new technologies that leaders hope will create change. However, the only real way to transform a company is to create alignment around small wins with small cross-functional teams, then consistently nudge others to join in. Suddenly, when people are rowing together, the wins start pouring in; everyone feels part of it, and innovation takes off. Because technology or people alone will not transform a business, it is critical to work with a hybrid SaaS tool like Rubano that coherently reflects how a company does its business.

Understanding Data Challenges to Foster Innovation

Today's consumer facing brands need cost-effective solutions to optimize performance, which means generating high-quality data to see trends early as well as to project the opportunity costs of one choice over another.

Hence, many brands' data science teams are often short-staffed and underutilized, which causes them to struggle to create data flows that yield real insights. "When we come in, we help them align organizationally around customer metrics, which provides a clear perspective on performance, and then flow that data up and down the organization, which creates alignment," mentions Allison. Ambition Data's innovative hybrid approach combines cost-effective consulting and technology and yields 3-10x ROI.

Allison revealed that when the company built Rubano, the team considered the shortcomings of most customer data platforms and each business' desire to understand its customers fluidly. Then the team married that to its own consulting knowledge of where value could typically be found in the dataset. The result turned out to a lovely hybrid model that gathers the right data, identifies the value within it, enhances it, and finally proves the ROI through an iterative measurement process.

Balancing Automation with Insights

Allison emphasizes that the leader of tomorrow is an algorithmic leader. The business world will have more data, producing better outcomes for its customers and the enterprise. However, algorithms lack common sense, so leaders need to stay engaged to ensure the outcomes are still desirable. Allison expects leaders to question when a nudge becomes more of a push, and when a repetitive behavior becomes an addiction. These are things humans can uniquely monitor and solve.

At the same time, Allison also acknowledges that business leaders are under more pressure to serve multiple investor audiences. By that, she points out that there are not only shareholders but also employee, environmental, and customer audiences. Balancing the sensitivities of each audience is tricky but necessary. In some industries such as Lemonade's disruption of insurance, shareholder value takes a firm back seat to customer needs and charitable causes.

Ambition Data aims to balance human insights with automation to alleviate the pressure of these business leaders.

Moving towards a Brighter Future

Allison asserts that Rubano was built to shape each company's data through a flexible, agile tool. In addition, the team consultants work side-by-side with clientele to customize and humanize the data so the resulting analytics can bring companies closer to their customers. The future of customer analytics is data in flight, not data at rest. For Allison, this means cleaner data, streaming faster, and creating intuitive responses. That could be inventory optimization, or arming the front line with the ability to make better choices, or more cost-effective marketing spends. Further, with precise customer data aligned to lifetime value, many use cases are possible, yielding a clear return on investment.

Radiating Advice to Next Generation

Every leader faces challenges. Some challenges are unique to women and often walk the line between deniable, dubious, and everyday business behavior. Allison advises budding women leaders to learn to identify challenges that originate from their gender and quickly move them out of the way. She encourages women to turn the problem inside out and consider what's not being said or done. Thinking outside the box helps Allison read a situation honestly and avoid being in the middle, and she is confident that it can help others.