Last week, I met with a company that had the most complete data that I have ever seen.  From web traffic to email/direct mail to transactions and so on, this company had invested in their data infrastructure as a key asset.  But when I met with them, they were still dissatisfied...

They weren't making money from the data.

The complaints that the digital marketing team had were the same ones that similar teams face in companies with less complete data:  "Management keeps asking questions that are interesting but not actionable." "We haven't had time to create the measurement approach," "Control groups are not part of the company culture here," and so on.  Despite having Big Data in better shape than most companies, they were still bogged down in the same issues as their less successful brethren.

The main complaint boiled down to one thing: "We don't know the right questions to ask."

This issue is not uncommon.  And very frustrating.  And as Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."  

When you look at companies who are the most successful at leveraging Big Data, they have the following characteristics:

1. Fewer questions to start, rather than more.  Rather than investigate everything under the sun, these companies have taken a "step-by-step" approach focusing on identifying opportunities for quick wins from relatively quick analysis.  

If you’re a marketer who thinks you can hand a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales, breathe a sigh of relief and go back to nurturing prospects, you may need to look for another line of work. This is old-school thinking and has no place in a 21^stcentury integrated enterprise, especially if it uses a good marketing automation platform.

Sales is a partner, not an internal customer. You need to do everything in your organization’s power to support the people who are trying to convert that lead to revenue. It is a true fact that marketing’s primary responsibility is to produce hot leads for sales but it is also important to participate/contribute after the lead is passed to sales. This could include:

No doubt, it has been a tough week for customer service. Internal Revenue Service acting agency head, Steven T. Miller who is resigning from his post stated earlier this week:

“I can say generally, we provided horrible customer service. I think that what happened here was that foolish mistakes were made by people trying to be more efficient in their workload selections.”

And if that didn’t capture enough of America’s attention, how about the Maserati owner only identified as Wang who smashed his $420,000 Quattroporte with sledgehammers to protest the dealer’s poor customer service while shocked onlookers watched?

Of course, the normal customer service experience for disgruntled customers rarely take on the profound consequences as these two examples, but the importance of being able to successfully and calmly maneuver through a maze of frustrating obstacles before getting problems resolved can seem insurmountable to consumers at any moment. With that in mind, the better part of valor calls for the customer to wait until he is calm before instituting contact for a bad product, poor service, or any project requiring the help of an organization’s customer service department.

I stepped off the train in London this morning and it struck me how many genuine and knock-off Barbour quilted jackets were among the commuter throng. And it made me think about just how commonplace they’ve become to the point that they’ve diluted their own brand image. “By Appointment to Her Majesty” has now become By Appointment to Everyone. It’s the new Puffa jacket for this generation and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

And the same is happening everywhere else. Apple and iOS has become synonymous with smartphones and tablets but has only one product per line of business. Therefor it’s the same hardware you see people with and it’s becoming ubiquitous. They are gorgeous products, they work seamlessly, but they’re everywhere. And for me it’s destroying the perception of brand value.

Conversely, Android’s presence has been fragmented across a myriad of OEM devices and while this actually causes a headache for developers, for consumers they feel slightly more exclusive to owning an Android-powered device because of the opposite to Apple: Many products against one OS offers more choice and personalisation.

It’s almost seen as a left-field choice, exactly the same position that Apple were in during the old Microsoft battles. (Only designers and photographers used Apple back then…../sarcasm)