10 mandatory steps to help in creating and sustaining data-driven culture at its core.

To get access to actionable insights, that can form a business approach, it is important for a company to become fully data-driven, and also to make use of the full range of data platforms that are available. Marketing and sales that focus on data-driven culture can escalate revenue and minimize expenditure at the same time.

Data have the potential to accelerate a new era of fact-based innovation that is backed by new ideas in companies. For the past decade, firms have focused on collecting data, investing in technologies, and paying for analytical talent. But for many companies, a strong data-driven culture remains evasive.

It is simple to describe how to incorporate data into a decision-making process but it is harder to make it normal for employees.

10 steps to create a data-driven culture-

Step 1- Make data-driven goals

Data is not a final product. To incorporate data into marketing and sales strategy, companies need to set goals for the data and parameters to know how it will influence the decision of the company. For example, if the company wants to increase revenue it is important to use sales data to see what sells and what does not and accordingly re-design the catalog or sales strategy. Data is a device, a means to an end, not the end itself. It's best to use it to make smarter decisions.

Step 2- Giving accurate access to data

It is important to identify who uses data at a company, like anyone in the company who interacts with customers has access to data. For instance, marketing people need to have access to the mix rate, the average customer acquisition cost, the email click-through rate among others. Similarly, sales need to have access to the sales data across products and services. It is important to analyze the data because every area of a company can benefit from using data.

Step 3- Selecting metrics

In a company, each department has its own requirement like measuring, evaluating initiatives, etc. Therefore, there are different metrics for different departments.

Marketing metrics-

• Web metrics: monitoring quality data like bounce rate and average time on site
• Qualified leads
• Social engagement
• Customer acquisition cost
• Conversion rate

Sales metrics-

• The sales funnel
• Quota fulfillment: The number of people on the team who is consistently meeting their quota
• Average deal size in dollars
• Revenue

Customer success metrics-

• Call wait time
• Time spent on each issue
• Number of issues logged and resolved daily
• Escalation requests
• Customer satisfaction scores

Management metrics- Data-driven decision-making is more critical at a management level.

• Downtime and its cost
• Employee satisfaction
• Productivity and average revenue per employee
• Actual cost and value of projects
• Return on investment for projects

Step 4- Elucidation focusing on collection and collation of data.

The responsibility of collecting data is on each department of a company. After collecting, each department passes the data to the management and from this level the collation of data becomes important. It is good to have a central system for all the data. The analysts of an organization analyze the data and revert back to the heads of the departments. Then each department team can put the insights received from the analysis into action.

Step 5- Using the right tools to analyze data

If the right tools are not used for analyzing data then it will lead to nothing but meaningless collections of numbers. If the right tools are used the outcomes will be much more useful. There is a huge collection of tools that can help an organization to get the most out of the data. Using the right tools helps in transmuting data into readable charts that make data accessible to anyone who needs it. Example Power BI tools, Tableau, and other tools.

Step 6- Giving specialized training to the staff

It is important for every organization to train their staff about data literacy, this will help to get the most valuable outcome from data that are available. Data literacy has already become an important field and there exist many training courses for employees. Every employee of an organization who faces the customers should get such training so that they get prepared to use data to its fullest extent.

Step 7- Sign up data experts

Every organization should invest in hiring data experts. Data analysts help in identifying the most useful metrics to track for the organization. Also, they help in creating models for making a decision based on data and make sure that the choices made by the organization have rationality and reasoning behind them. Therefore, appointing qualified data consultants will help the organization to mend their approach to data collection resulting in improvement of all aspects of business and sustainable model for the future.

Step 8- Regular data stack updating

After collecting data, it is required for an organization to refine and refresh the data stack because data are only useful when it is fresh. The spending, responsiveness, and habits of customer changes over time to various marketing techniques. Therefore, it is needed to add new data to the stack otherwise the decision-making of an organization can get hampered.

Step 9- Reward employees for using data

For many companies particularly small businesses, a data-driven strategy is a new aspect of customer success. However modern technology makes it simpler to collect and analyze data. Therefore, it will be helpful to reward the employees who make meaning full decisions based on data.

Step 10- Make habit of explaining analytical choices

Data scientists must make choices with different tradeoffs. It is important to ask the team how they approached a problem, how they analyzed it and understood the tradeoffs. This gives the team a deeper understanding of the approaches.