Unread Volumes

The other day, I ended up browsing the internet and focused a bit on library closures.  I’m really just struck by the similarities between our libraries in the United States and the whole concept of data management.  Of course, I have opinions about public libraries and the services they provide, and I have many memories about my experiences within them.  (They even go deeper than being told to “hush!”)  The current state of libraries in our world, though, has some clear similarities to how data is managed, and I thought I’d write a bit about it.

Really, libraries are closing because they’re unused.  I realize that’s a gross generalization, and I realize that they offer critical help to many in our country who are without internet connections and have no ready access to information.  I get all that.  That may be enough of a reason to keep a library open.  I’m just struck by how much data a company has that’s unused.  The typical sales enterprise, for example, can draw from a database critical metrics and yet it doesn’t.

Do a quick Google search for “Important Sales Metrics” and you get varied results, but the problem I have is that the metrics everyone claims are important are almost always results-based metrics.  Time from suspect to prospect.  Time from prospect to lead.  Time from lead to qualified.  Proposals vs. closes.  Sure, these statistics tell us something, but in my mind, metrics ought to be process-based.  We ought to look at what our sales department does (I mean the actual actions) and how they impact sales.  Realistically, if your standard sales reports show you a problem, you can’t take real action without an objective, data-driven analysis of the actions providing the results.

The problem for me is that the data is in there, unused like countless of volumes at your local library.  Almost all CRM software has the capability to record actions, but the data is almost always unused or left only in the hands of the salesperson.  Realistically, wouldn’t you want to know that initial follow-up by email resulted in 12% higher sales than a phone call and resulting message?  Wouldn’t you want to know the reverse?  Doesn’t it make sense to discover the most successful salespeople in your organization do something different and duplicable? You can exhort your sales people to do better, but exhorting them without direction is ludicrous, and when you have an entire sales force, measuring their results isn’t the same as measuring their performance.  Results come from performance, and performance is the obligation of management to…well, to manage.  Why aren’t we looking at that data?

If we were, do you think we’d be catching on to the changing company-marketing-sales-customer dynamic a bit better?  There’s a great deal of information to be mined, but as long as we’re looking at the same queries and the same reports we used twenty-five years ago; that data is just a library sadly on its way to closure.