You Ask, I Answer: How to Sell Analytics?

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You Ask, I Answer: How to Sell Analytics?

Amanda asks, “How do you sell analytics when people don’t even want to look at their analytics?”

Watch, listen, or read to find out my answer.

You Ask, I Answer: How to Sell Analytics?

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Christopher Penn 0:13

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 it you know, as a data science company, 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, or 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 have 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.

Right? The way that it’s a PowerPoint, an interactive dashboard, standing in front of the board for 20 minutes explaining things, whatever the the outcome is, that’s what you’re selling.

And sometimes you’re not even selling that sometimes it’s a further 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 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 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.

It’s one of the reasons why, for example, a lot of analytic software, you have a hard time selling, right? Microsoft Excel is kind of bundled into Microsoft Office, it’s, you can buy an ala carte, but don’t really nobody does.

Google Analytics isn’t sold, right? It’s it’s given away.

Now, there’s many reasons for that.

But to encourage adoption of it, they had to give it away.

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 are selling insights you can make that will improve your business decision making or saving you time on processing data, something like that, where, again, 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? Yeah, it’s actually the 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? What steps are being taken, you do if you want to cook a dish, you know, that you really like at home and you want to try and reverse engineer it.

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 Bachi grill where they’re just gonna like cook in front of you and put on a show.

For the most part, though, you’re buying that finished products 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 buying a lot of convenience in one package.

When we sell analytics.

If we’re selling, trying to sell the process instead of trying to sell the outcome we’re not going to do well.

I’ve not seen a restaurant ad maybe ever that talked about the cook Same process, I have seen plenty of ads, talking about the finished products, you know where there’s a picture of a steak or chicken or a salad or something like that and save money save time.

Christopher Penn 5:14

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.

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, to sell analytics is to sell the outcome.

Here’s what you’re going to get.

Right? When you look at a menu at a restaurant, particularly 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.

Oh, 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.

I guess you can do that a Bochy restaurant or a sushi place and stuff, watch the sushi chef fields in there, 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 the hibachi restaurant, there was the show and Okay, it’s time to leave.

Now you actually eat the outcome.

And so the process, even when it’s a show, still, we’re really still buying that outcome or just some entertainment along the way.

So that’s how you sell analytics to people who don’t even want to look at their animal once you find the outcome they’re after and you sell them their outcome.

And if you don’t know what that outcome is, you got to ask them, what outcome are you after? What decisions you’re going to make, what actions you’re going to take and build your sales process around that.

Good question.

Thanks for asking.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

Christopher Penn 0:13

Christopher Penn 5:14

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