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?”
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn 0:13
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, when I encounter someone who is in curious about analytics and analytics results, is to ask the simple question, well, what do you get paid for? Right? What are you held accountable for? 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 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 might have this long and thorough and detailed analysis of your Twitter following and the creative directors like and how 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, 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 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 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 a person like me, who cooks a lot, and I don’t have a need for a blender, it’s not, it’s not at me, 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, I could have a relatively easy time, explained to me, the benefits your particular blender, but I’m interested.
So because 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, 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 prospects head is permanently tuned to one station wi I fm.
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? 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 like to sign me up.
Shelby give me all the data, right.
Christopher Penn 4:35
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 work.
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 explain symptom, this is a decision we want you to make.
Right? If your organic search traffic is down by 20%, month over month, I need you to decide on getting more inbound links to your site because without it, this number is going to keep going down and you’re going to look bad, and you’re not going to get your bonus.
Right, being able to explain that latter part mix ago.
Uh huh.
Okay, I want my thought is how do I get my bonus? People are naturally self interested.
And 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 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 half the person is like, I got 22 Things To Do I triple booked for this hour, my hair’s on fire, just tell me what you need me to do.
Right? You’re not going to get any buy in for exploratory data analysis, you’re not going to be able to sit down with them and spend time with them and say, let’s look at our data.
They don’t have the ability to do that.
They’re in a crisis state.
And in a crisis state, you’ve got to widdle 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 a decision, here’s the impact of not making a decision or making the wrong decision.
Please choose.
That’s it.
So it always comes back to self interest.
What is the other person going to 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.
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