You Ask, I Answer: Business Intelligence Tools for Marketers?

Shawney asks, what new age business intelligence tools would you recommend for marketers? New age? Like healing crystals and stuff? Um I'm assuming you mean what new uh what new technologies uh would I recommend for marketers. I wouldn't.

Now here's why. Business intelligence tools are like appliances. Right. An appliance like a blender, for example, is only as good as the person using it, the ingredients that go into it, and the recipe you're trying to make. Recommending a you know a shinier, faster, more powerful blender doesn't help if you don't know what a blender is or how to use one properly, right?

Let's say you're making smoothies. Should you be using a blender? Yes. Right? Because making a smoothie by hand sucks.

Um, if you're making steak, should you use a blender? No. Oh, you shouldn't. Not for any reason. I can't think of a single application where that makes sense.

So there are all these business intelligence tools out there. Uh there's classics like SPSS, there's Tableau, there's Alterics, there's R Studio and Python and Google Data Studio, and you name it. There's so many to choose from. And here's the secret that the vendors don't want you to know. For the most part, they all pretty much do the same thing.

There are little differences here and there. Certainly, user interface and customer support and stuff are valid differentiators, but in terms of the core functionality, business intelligence tools are about as different as blenders are, right? So you can get like the super high-end, you know, $900 Vitamix, or you can get, you know, the Amazon basics, you know, a $99 blender, and they fundamentally do the same thing, right? They blend things. How well they blend things, how long the motor lasts and stuff, those are the differentiators.

Quality of builds, uh service, and support. Same is true for BI tools. There are different BI tools that fit like what cloud platform you're tied into, like Power BI. If you're a Microsoft shop, you're probably using Power BI whether you want to or not. Um if you're an IBM shop, you're using Watson Studio again, whether you want to or not.

So the question then becomes well, if the tool isn't the differentiator, what is? And the answer is you. What I would recommend for marketers is not more tools, right? If you've got a blender, you don't need a second blender. Um even though every blender vendor out there would like you to buy their blender, you don't need more than one.

Maybe two if you're afraid that that one's gonna break. Same with BI tools. It's not a question of do you need a better tool? Unless the tool you've bought is horrendous. The bigger question is do you know how to use the ones you have?

And do you know how a book of recipes and do you have the right ingredients? So let's presume and say you have the right ingredients. You've got good data and it's clean, which is admittedly a very large assumption. Do you personally know the different statistical techniques that your BI tool is performing? Do you know what questions to ask of it?

Do you know when you should use regression versus classification? Do you know the different types of regression? That knowledge, which is kind of like recipes, recipes and techniques in cooking, right? That knowledge is what's going to make a BI tool useful. So it's not the tool, it's the person using the tool.

And so I would recommend to marketers that you learn the basics of data science. You don't have to become a data scientist, right? You don't have to uh go back and study calculus and linear algebra and stuff like that. But you should know, for example, what are the different kinds types of regression? You know, that what are the different types of classification?

There's binary classification, multinomial classification. You should know what those things mean. You don't need to know the math behind them necessarily, but you should know if you open a BI tool, what do all these buttons do and what do they mean? When you look at a blender and you look at the control panel for a blender, you should at least have a general idea of what each button does. You don't have to know the specifics.

You don't have to know how electricity flows through the electromagnets that powers the motor and all this stuff. That's that's not helpful. But if there's a smoothie button and there's a soup button, you probably should know the difference between the two. The same thing was true of your BI tools. Uh, if a tool is saying, here's some regression, here's some prediction, here's some classification, what does it mean?

What do the buttons do? When do I use any given button? Do you uh push this button when you have data from Excel? Do you push this button when you have data from Google Analytics? How do you reconcile all these different options?

When you know that, when you've learned that and you can make really good informed decisions with your BI tool, then you're cooking. Then you're able to make the most of what you have. And as at that point where you can then say and make an informed decision, yeah, actually, the $99 blender is not cutting it anymore. We need something a little higher end. But you'll know why.

You'll know what things your BI tool can and cannot do. If you're trying to do, for example, like uh XGBoost, and the tool you have only does linear regression. You can say, ah, yeah, we need to upgrade because the techniques that we want to use are not available in our tool. But it has to be driven by your business requirements, by your data requirements, and by the skills of the people on your team. One of the big challenges with a lot of BI tools is that, yeah, they all have like you know, Swiss Army knife stuff of you know all sorts of different techniques.

But do you know what to do with it? Do you know when to apply each of these techniques? And that's what sets apart not only BI tools, but that's what sets apart people in the organization. I know when to use this technique versus that technique, right? It's like cooking.

Do you know when to blend and when to fry or to broil? They're different, they're very different. Again, if you're making steak, you're probably going to want to broil, maybe fry, definitely never blend. So that's what I would recommend. Um, I can almost certainly guess there are a number of people who work at vendors saying, I wish you had mentioned my tool.

And look, I'm sure your tool is great. In the hands of somebody incompetent, it's useless. In the hands of somebody who's proficient, it it does amazing things. Your challenge as a vendor is to make more people who are competent at business intelligence in general. And your tool just happens to be the vehicle by which they do their work.

But if you don't have that audience of people who are really good at business intelligence, at the mathematical and statistical techniques, then developing the shiniest tool in the world won't help because it's like owning a blender that you never use. It's a really good question. Thanks for asking.