Worcester Business Journal

18 Worcester Business Journal | November 25, 2019 | wbjournal.com By Emrah Cakir Emrah Cakir is the director of information management and analytics for Worcester insurer Fallon Health. Reach him at Emrah. Cakir@fallonhealth.org. As organizations aspire to become more data-driv- en, many still struggle to combine their data assets with analytics to improve their business outcomes. By embracing analytics, your business will be able to better identify new products, determine how to better serve customers and improve operations. 10) You can't improve what you can't measure. Before trying to improve business outcomes, you need to associate them with key performance indi- cators (KPIs). These can be different, such as gross margin, revenue on advertising spent, or blog views. 9) Data, data, data. This is crucial for calculating your KPIs and gaining additional insights into how your business is operating. Make the effort to catalog and classify your data sources. These could be internal such as your online sales software or external data sources you might have access to. 8) Start with baby steps. Link your KPIs to your data sources and prioritize them. Start with the top three or five priorities, depending on your bandwidth and resources. As you complete these and gain more experience, move on to the others. 7) Dig deeper. As you monitor your KPIs, you will notice the changes. Hopefully, trends are moving in a positive direction, but sometimes they are neg- ative. Analyze why. Find the root cause(s) to better understand what is driving these results. 6) Be ready to take action: As you discover root causes hindering your performance, you will need to tackle them. On the flip side, as you discover behav- iors helping you improve, consider expanding them to other departments and/or lines of businesses. 5) Leverage technology. The data and analytics technology market can be very complicated and expensive. However, there is a solution for almost every need and budget. LinkedIn is full of groups where experienced professionals share feedback. 4) Don't reinvent the wheel. If your informa- tion-technology team is small or other priorities are taking up their time, explore vendors packaging platforms and services removing complexity. 3) Look for win-win proposals. Partner with the universities in your area for internships and semester projects. Data and analytics is a hot topic in today's market, and there are a lot of students out there looking for the opportunities. 2) Rinse and repeat. As your business grows and changes, remember to re-visit this list and repeat the required steps to adopt, change and evolve. Add more data sources, track additional KPIs, etc. 1) Invest back into your data & analytics pro- gram. As you mature in your journey of becoming a data-driven organization, remember to invest back in order to stay up-to-date and become more efficient. K N O W H O W Marketing is an investment, not an expense 10 1: W O R K P L A C E A G E I S M A ccording to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, our labor force is expected to grow to 164 million people by 2024, of which 13 million will be 65 and above. is category is projected to see faster annual labor-force growth rates than any other group, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Age discrimination has negative effects on all employees, no matter their age. And experts say out-of-control biases can cause your company to miss out, in these times of low unemployment, restricted immigration and with an older workforce wanting to stay working. Training, please. 21% of those over the age of 40 have been the victim of age discrimination, said FastCompany. com's Jared Lindzon, while 62% say they haven't received any training related to age-based discrimination over the past year. "One of the reasons why a majority of employers – many of whom offer other forms of discrimination training – don't offer age-related bias training is a lack of awareness, as incidents oen go unreported," he said. Start with recruitment. Does your website include only photos of younger workers? Is your interview panel age diverse? "Train recruiters and interviewers to avoid ageist assumptions," writes Jathan Janove at SHRM.org, "such as that a younger worker will work for a lower salary or that an older worker will not remain on the job for long." Realize ageism hurts your company. It breeds legal woes, according to HR People + Strategy's Andrea Choate. is kind of discrimination can cause costly mistakes due to inexperienced workers – newbies don't have in-the- trenches expertise of older workers. Ageism causes a smaller pool of mentors and potentially a loss of clients who have been nurtured by older workers over years. 10 T H I NG S I know about . . . ... Improving business outcomes through analytics BY CHRIS CIUNCI Special to the Worcester Business Journal P eter Drucker, the father of modern management, said, "Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs." Although today's business owners are inclined to see marketing as an expense, Drucker's view of marketing as an investment needed to drive results is more accurate. Build a moat around your business When organizations treat marketing as an expense, they focus on short- term sales and ignore the long term. Most of their marketing dollars go toward tangible paid media purchases, for example, an ad or a click on Google. ese expenditures might provide short-term quick sales wins, but they have minimal ability to drive value aer the money has been spent. A print ad placed in a trade magazine may result in a sale, but it is unlikely to retain that customer or draw customers aer the ad has gone of print. If you want your company to grow, your goal should be to build as much of a moat around your business as you can. is is achieved by continuous investment of marketing dollars into your owned assets. Such investments may include updating your message and website every year, producing customer video testimonials for use as sales tools, developing a series of educational webinars, and investing in the development of relevant content used for thought leadership. Although these efforts may not produce short-term returns, they will certainly aid in strengthening your business over time. e problem is if you only look for marketing initiatives guaranteeing an immediate ROI, you will never plant any of these long- term marketing seeds needed to build the moat necessary for a sustainable competitive advantage. Walking the walk Examining my own life as a business owner, I have walked the walk while growing TribalVision. e reason TribalVision has achieved success is, from day one, I've understood the importance of marketing in order to unlock dramatic growth. Before even opening the doors for business, and with little money to spare, I wrote a book, craed TribalVision's message, built a website making TribalVision look like an established company, developed an animated video to explain the why behind TribalVision, wrote white papers, developed numerous presentations, and craed a 30-page marketing plan. If I had viewed marketing as an expense rather than an investment, I never would have done any of these activities. I simply would have started TribalVision with a business card, an average 10-page website and little else. Looking back eight years later, although I can't attribute a specific ROI to each of those assets, I know those investments have provided a much larger payoff than short-term guaranteed ROI initiatives. Key takeaway If we are to build something great, we must take a leap of faith – a calculated leap of faith but a leap of faith nonetheless. If Howard Schultz, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Elon Musk invested only in efforts backed by guaranteed results, they never would have built their empires. Hopefully, you will view marketing as an investment. is very simple mindset can make the difference between gradual and dramatic growth. Chris Ciunci is the founder and managing partner for marketing firm TribalVision, with offices in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Reach him at cciunci@tribalvision.com. BY SUSAN SHALHOUB Special to the Worcester Business Journal W W W

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