You Ask, I Answer: How to Sell Analytics?

In this episode, Amanda asks, how do you sell analytics when people don't even want to look at their analytics? Okay. It's a good question, particularly since you know, as a data science company, um, my company, Trust Insights, does sell the outcomes of analytics. We don't sell analytics itself because you can't. You can't sell analytics.

Right. And here's why. Analytics, the process of analysis, isn't something that anyone wants to buy. No one wants to buy analysis. What they want to buy are outcomes.

They want to buy finished products. If we substitute the word analysis or analytics for cooking, right? When you take raw data and you process it and find out what happened that data, what are you selling somebody? Are you selling them the process of processing the data? No.

When you go to a restaurant, are you paying for cooking? No. You are paying for a plate in front of you of prepared food because you didn't want to cook at home. Right? When you sell analytics, you're actually selling not just the processing of data, but the finished product.

Sometimes it's a further a step further down the value chain. You might be selling a decision, right? Or a process for arriving at decisions. When we do email marketing analytics, it's not just about what was your open rate, right? Or uh this number of subscribers subscribe to your newsletter or whatever.

It's here's two or three decisions for you to make. Should you implement SPF? Should you include a picture of your dog in your email newsletter? Should you do this or that or the other thing? And what's being sold are the decisions that people can make that would be most impactful on the outcomes that they're after.

So you don't sell analytics. Nobody sells analytics. Um it's one of the reasons why, for example, a lot of analytics software you have a hard time selling, right? Um, you know, Microsoft Excel is kind of bundled into Microsoft Office. It it's it you can buy it a la carte, but really nobody does.

Google Analytics isn't sold, right? It's it's given away. Now, there's many reasons for that. Um, but to encourage adoption of it, they had to give it away. Uh major competitors like Adobe Analytics, they do sell their product, but when you look at their marketing collateral, they're not selling the process of analytics, they are selling outcomes, they're selling uh insights that you can make that will improve your business decision making or saving you time on processing your data, something like that, where again, the the process of analysis is not what's being sold.

When we take a step back and think about how we try to sell analytics, we realize that most of the time most of us are selling it wrong. We could talk about the quality of analysis. And there is some merit to that. I mean, again, substitute the word analytics for cooking. A minimum level of quality is essential, right?

It's actually legal requirements for how to handle food safely. But beyond that, do you really care who is in the kitchen cooking or how it's being prepared, uh, or what steps are being taken? You do if you want to cook it a dish, you know, that you really like at home and you want to try and reverse engineer it, but but if you're there just to have dinner, you're not there most of the time to watch the process of cooking. The exception being like a hibachi grill where they're just gonna like cook in front of you and and and put on a show. For the most part, though, you're buying that finished product.

You're buying the not having to cook at home, not having to spend the time, not having to go grocery shopping and things. You're you're buying a lot of convenience in one package. When we sell analytics, if we are selling, trying to sell the process instead of trying to sell the outcome, we're not gonna do well. I've not seen a uh a restaurant ad, maybe ever, that talked about the cooking process. I have seen plenty of ads talking about the finished product, you know, whether there's a picture of a steak or a chicken or a salad or something like that, and you know, they save money, save time, um try a new cuisine, but not try a new cooking process.

Right now, you can sell appliances that way, right? Hey, here's an air fryer. It helps you fry better and faster, it's a healthier way of frying, etc. Um, and you can sell analytics tools that way. Here's a tool that will process your Google Analytics data differently or better or faster with fewer mistakes.

But selling the process of analytics is extremely difficult. And it's not the best focus. The focus to sell analytics is to sell the outcome. Here's what you're gonna get. When you look at a menu at a restaurant, particularly like at the diner where there's pictures of everything, there's no process there.

You're looking at a nice food picture of a burger and fries or a steak or whatever, and you're going, oh, that looks good. I'm gonna get that. Or that sounds good. You're buying outcomes. So that's true for a lot of things.

If you find that you're having trouble selling something, it probably means you're not selling the outcome enough. It probably means you're bogged down in selling the process, and people don't buy process, people buy outcomes. You and I buy outcomes. If we bought process, we would be standing in the kitchen watching somebody cook. Right?

Like I said, you can do that at a hibachi restaurant or a sushi place and stuff, watch the sushi chef sitting there, you know, trimming the tuna and stuff like that. And that's there's there's value in that for the entertainment factor, but that's not why you're buying it because you don't leave when you're done watching the process, right? You don't leave a hibachi restaurant. Uh yeah, there's the show, and okay, it's time to leave. Like, no, you actually, eat the outcome.

And so the process, even when it's a show, still we're really still buying that outcome. We're just some entertainment along the way. So that's how you sell analytics to people who don't even want to look at their analytics. You find the outcome they're after and you sell them their outcome. And if you don't know what that outcome is, you gotta ask them: what outcome are you after?

What decisions are you gonna make? What actions are you gonna take? And build your sales process around that. Good question. Thanks for asking.

If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.