Data-driven working in 4 steps: how to create a roadmap

[jrineakter]

Live Q&A: The Future of AI in 2025. Join the free webinar with AI expert Patrick Klerks on February 6
When you search for information online, you leave behind digital ‘trace’. Collecting these traces is becoming increasingly important for B2B marketers. What do they want to tell us? Collecting this data is just the beginning. You need to put it in context to draw conclusions. A data roadmap helps you provide context and prioritize to achieve your goals faster.


Instead of constantly coming up with new campaigns, marketers should make much more use of the data (and therefore the knowledge) about customers and prospects that is readily available.

Data helps you with two important goals. Internally, because the entire company looks at the same data and determines the direction. But also externally, towards your (potential) customers, because you gain insight into their wishes and needs - and which campaigns are successful or not.

Data-driven companies that are well advanced in their data maturity work more efficiently and therefore achieve higher results. But before you focus only on the end goal, you need argentina telegram number list to look at which steps are feasible in the short term. With a data roadmap you can take concrete steps to achieve the goals of the organization.

1. Baseline measurement


The first step is to determine the data landscape to analyze where you are now. How mature are you according to the data maturity model? Questions that need to be asked are: 'what data and touchpoints are there now?', 'what is done with customer and prospect data now?', 'what systems are there within our organization?' and 'how are these systems linked?'.

Many companies suffer from data silos. Customer data is not interpreted in the same way by everyone in the organization. That is why you need to make sure that you are talking about the same thing when using terms such as 'the customer', 'conversion' and 'leads'. Is a customer someone who has concluded something in the past year or also someone who purchased something two years ago? Is a lead someone whose email address we have or do we also need to know at least the first and last name? As basic as it may sound, there are often quite a few differences within organizations about these types of concepts and how they are measured. Who does not recognize a presentation of figures where other participants in the meeting question the definition of the figures. The rest of the meeting is then only about this and not about the business.

2. Big goal versus 90 days goal
Organizations quickly fall into setting goals that are too big. A good example of this is 'creating a customer-driven organization.' These types of goals often fail because they are not specified enough. They are not tangible enough. When are you customer-driven? And what steps do you need to take to become more customer-driven? That is why I make a distinction between a 'big audience goal' and a '90 days goal'.

Being customer-driven is a big goal: the big goal that you are working towards as an organization. Now break this goal down into pieces and think about which goals you can achieve in 90 days to reach the big goal. If you want to work customer-driven, you want to have insight into which customers left last year or which complaints were received the most and why.

Don't forget your stakeholders
Important from step 1: set these goals with multiple stakeholders in the organization. After all, much of the data you need, you have to get from other departments. For example, if you want to focus on customers, you want data from service, account management and finance. If your goals are focused on growth in new business, it is important to have commitment from sales and product development.



3. Blind spots
By making a data audit you will gain insight into your blind spots. For example, you may want to focus on a certain market, but discover that you have no knowledge of that market. As a result, you miss crucial information for your propositions. Make sure that these blind spots are eliminated.

Is the data crucial to contribute to the 90 days goal to achieve the big goal? First of all, make sure you have a list of partners who can make this kind of data insightful for you. There are many data companies where you can smartly purchase data. Secondly, make sure you have an action plan for how this data can be collected in the future.

4. Business case
Many (senior) managers are not yet convinced that integrated data is crucial for maintaining an advantage as an organization. As a result, you may not get enough investment to buy data from external parties for step 3. Therefore, demonstrate the added value of data with a business case. Choose one of your 90-day goals. These do not always have to be expressed in figures and profit. People with a finance background mainly want to calculate things, but a successful business case can also describe what a better link between marketing and sales means for the insight into the customer journey. The point is that the business case creates value and clearly contributes to the company goal.