Convincing Leadership Their Data is Valuable

If you’re your company’s data champion, you know that data can help anyone make faster, more informed decisions. But, one of the biggest challenges is convincing leadership that your mountain of neglected data is more than just costly clutter - especially if you’re in an organization that doesn’t have much of a data culture.

So how do you get them to see it your way?

Key Takeaway - Let leadership convince themselves by asking the right questions.

Start by asking, “What’s one insight that you don’t currently have about your business that you’d love to have at your fingertips?”

They’ll often come back with more than one data point or a combination of data points that aren’t currently connected. Maybe something like “I want to know how many customers took a course AND attended an event”, or “I need to connect our forecasted budget to actual spending”.

Side note: if they say they already have all of the information they could want about their business, coming to the conversation with a couple examples of your own can spark ideation. Maybe something like, “What about market trends? Customer feedback? Operational roadblocks?”

Next, ask the followup question, “What would you do or change if you had that information?”

And finally, “How valuable would it be to the organization if you could make these informed decisions on an ongoing basis?”

The most common reply to this is, “It would be huge, but how do we implement this? We’ve invested in the past but it's never worked.”

That’s when you introduce the concept of the “Data Journey”.

This image shows that data has a long way to go before you see its true value. And most “past attempts at data” involve investing in the first few circles (if at all).

Of note about their answer; if they’re thinking about how to integrate data into the organization, they’ve already moved past the why. And that was the goal of the conversation. Their perspective has changed.

We’ll cover many “hows” in future newsletters, bur for now, my question for you is: Have you ever tried to convince others about the value of data? How did it go?