You Ask, I Answer: Presenting Analytics to Non-Analytical People?

In today's episode, Valda asks, how do you recommend presenting analytics to marketing managers and creative teams who are mainly focused on their next project and not how the last one performed? My go-to uh when I encounter someone who is incurious about uh analytics and analytics results is to ask the simple question, well, what do you get paid for? Right? What are you held accountable for? Uh, what do you get your bonus for at the end of the year?

What are you going to get fired for if you don't do it? Right. And if your analytics and your data can draw a straight line between what you're doing and what that person is getting paid for, then it's pretty easy to convince them, hey, you should probably take a look at the results from this last project or campaign or whatever, because it directly impacts your paycheck. On the other hand, if what you're presenting has no relationship to them, it's understandable why they wouldn't care about it, right? You you might have this long and thorough and detailed analysis of your Twitter following, and the creative director is like, and how how I I don't get paid for tweets, right?

I don't get paid for responses to tweets. On the other hand, if that creative director is being compensated for artwork that gets attention, and you can say, hey, when we have your work in our social media calendar, it outperforms everything else by 2.4x. They can then say, you know, legitimately, hey, my work increases the benefit of our marketing, increases the impact of our marketing by 2.4x. And for them, it's super easy to say, yeah, you should pay me more, give me a bonus, whatever, because I'm I'm improving marketing by doing these things. Anytime you're trying to persuade somebody to take a look at some data, you are essentially making a sale, right?

You are selling them on the idea that what you have to offer is valuable. You want them to buy your idea with their attention, right? With their influence, with their uh decision making within the organization. And if you're presenting something to them that they don't want to buy, you're not going to sell it, right? If you sold blenders and you're talking to uh a person like me who cooks a lot, and I don't have a need for a blender, it's not a it's not a need, then you're gonna have a really hard time persuading me that I need your blender, right?

On the other hand, if my blender just broke, you're probably gonna have a relatively easy time explaining to me you know the benefits of your particular blender, but I'm interested. So our reporting is essentially a sale of an idea, possibly more than one, because we may be trying to sell people on an action we want them to take or a decision we want them to make, then we need to format our idea in such a way that it makes the sale. And the easiest way to do that, you know, I had a sales manager years ago who always said the radio station in your prospect's head is permanently tuned to one station, W I I F M. What's in it for me? When you talk about analytics to somebody, what's in it for them?

What do they get out of it? If they give you five minutes, 15 minutes, an hour of your time, what's in it for them? What is your analysis? What is your data going to do for them? If the answer is nothing, right, then you're not going to get buy-in.

Right? You're not going to get attention. You're not going to get the kinds of things that you want out of that meeting. On the other hand, if you're selling them a larger bonus for them, right, pretty easy sale to say, yes, I'm going to help you get a 20% better bonus this year. They'd be like, sign me up.

Show me, give me all the data, right? In every instance where I've had a client who was resistant to the data we were showing them, it was largely because they didn't see how it related to their world. They didn't they didn't understand the action they were supposed to take, they didn't understand the decision they were supposed to make. And as time has gone by, you know, I know I've certainly gotten better at explaining it to them. This is the decision we want you to make, right?

If your organic search traffic is down by 20%, you know, month over month, I need you to decide on uh getting more inbound links to your site because without it, uh this number's gonna keep going down, and you're gonna look bad and you're not gonna get your bonus, right? Being able to explain that latter part makes them go, uh-huh. Okay, I I want my bonus. How do I how do I get my bonus? Um people are naturally self-interested, and the the more stressful an organization is, the more operationally challenged they are, the harder it is for that person to do their job in their organization, the more you have to tie your analysis to uh very clear decisions and very clear benefits.

In an organization where people are not you know under a lot of stress or you know, feeling in a constant state of threat, you could present something like descriptive analytics as more of an exploration, like hey, we have some cool stuff, let's explore together and see what's in here. And because people have the time and the mental bandwidth to go, yeah, I'd be interested in seeing that. You don't have to sell them as hard. On the other hand, if the person's like, I got 22 things to do, I've triple booked for this hour, uh, my hair's on fire. Just tell me what you need me to do, right?

You're not gonna get any buy-in for exploratory data analysis. You're not gonna be able to sit down with them and spend time with them and say, Let's look at our data. Um, they don't have the ability to do that, they're in a crisis state, and in a crisis state, you've got to whittle things back until you it's it's just the essentials. Here's the decision we need you to make. Here's the impact of making the decision, here's the impact of not making the decision or making the wrong decision.

You know, please choose. That's it. So it always comes back to self-interest. What is the other person gonna get out of your analysis? And how can you be as clear as possible in that analysis so that they understand its value and so that they respect the time that you've put into it and they take the actions that you want them to take?

So, really good question.