Big Data and Advanced Analytics: success stories from the front lines
4. ?Keeping it simple? Too much information is overwhelming. That’s why it’s important to keep reports simple or they won’t be used. One large B2B manufacturer, for example, recognized that a large percentage of the company’s sales flowed from a small proportion of its customer base, but sales growth with those big customers was sluggish. Managers wanted local sales representatives to find new customers, so the company created a central analytics team that gathered detailed data and built predictive models that identified the local markets with the highest new-customer sales potential. Rather than give the sales reps reams of data and complex models, the team created a powerful tool with a simple, visual interface that pinpointed new-customer potential by zip code. This tool allowed district sales managers to see zip codes where there was an opportunity for high growth and deploy their sales teams against these areas. In the end, using the tool enabled the company to double its rate of sales growth while actually cutting its sales costs. (For more, read “Use Big Data to find new micromarkets” and “Simplify Big Data – or it’ll be useless for sales”).
“The key to Big Data is keeping it simple”
Crunching data is not an automatic ticket for success, any more than putting up a website turned every company in the dotcom era into an e-commerce juggernaut. If the rollout of IT in the corporate world over the last 30 years has taught one lesson, it’s that the adoption of a transformative technology always requires careful and creative management grounded in facts. The new new thing never succeeds without a lot of help from the old old thing.
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