Self-Service Analytics: Real-World Tips to Grow Business

In CPG, the name of the game is increasing market share. How do you do this? You have to employ the right mix of spend optimization, rapid product innovation, and best-in-class sales and marketing programs. And while most organizations can obtain the information necessary to increase market share, integrating all the necessary types and sources of information to use in product, campaign and channel decisions has proven extremely difficult.

 

On March 31, 2011, during a CGT Web seminar, Lora Cecere, a partner with Altimeter Group and the author of enterprise software blog ‘Supply Chain Shaman’, joined David Caruso, vice president of Marketing and Product Management at Endeca Technologies, and Kevin Crothers, vice president Enterprise Solutions, to reveal real-world case studies from leading CPG firms. Here are some other highlights from the Web event:

 

--Cecere set the stage by revealing trends in the CPG industry. She believes that companies are overwhelmingly asking for help with sales and marketing analytics issues. They are unsure what to do with data that retailers are giving them and how to connect trade promotion or price optimization. “There isn’t an easy answer,” said Cecere. She also talked in further detail about this dilemma, how to solve it, roadblocks and emerging technologies, like search engine optimization, to perhaps help companies. “We need to be able to recognize the fact that we have lots of types of systems [sales accounting systems, downstream data, marketing reporting etc.] that we have to be able to connect together. In the absence of the data model and in the absence of traditional master data systems failing, we need to try a different approach,” she closed.

 

--Caruso and Crothers shared their perspectives based on real-world case studies. They explored how one firm not only beat its information access problems but also triggered a dramatic transformation of its go-to-market processes with self-service analytics. Like many CPG firms, this firm had a large amount of proprietary and purchased data in multiple sources, which were not connected and therefore did not provide meaningful insights to the organization. Crothers explained, “It is one of those challenges that -- if it can be solved -- is typically hitting hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of spend in promotional marketing, so this was a very high value for this particular customer.”

 

They revealed other tips to win with self-service analytics, including:

--How to prevent information overload

--How to make effective decisions in all areas from design to development and sales and marketing deployment

--How to unify the most essential data (consumer blogs, newsfeeds and other unstructured content) with sales and campaign data to better understand challenges

--How to take measures to battle this issue and propel business forward

 

“What we’re seeing today is that more and more senior level leaders are looking to solve really complex, cross-functional, strategic issues,” said Caruso.

 

To listen to this Web seminar in its entirety, click here.