Let’s explore the decision-making process that a business user, say a Sales Manager or a Brand Manager, goes through. The aim would be to identify the challenges they face during this process and explore a very relevant solution for that.
We’ll do this step-wise:
- The challenge is presented
Either the business user is actively analyzing a piece of information, looking for solutions, or a challenge presents itself, which s/he starts solving.
For example, he observes that Total Sales in Region X has shown degrowth.
- Possible reasons are explored
Identifying the problem is the first step toward formulating a solution. Total Sales has shown degrowth, the first question that is raised is ‘Why’. For that, the Sales manager will look at whether his primary and secondary sales targets are being achieved or not.
The Brand Manager, or the Data Manager, as they are called in certain roles, will go a little further to investigate other aspects that might help arrive at the reasons for the degrowth.
Some of the other areas that will be scrutinized are:
a. Market Data
First off, one sees how the market is performing. If my brand is down by 2%, but the entire category is down by 4%, then there’s no real cause for worry. For example, sales of ice cream are bound to go down during the monsoon season.
Market data would also include the tracking, measurement and evaluation of marketing spends. It also includes surveying competition’s activities and correlating it to the change in sales of our own brand.
b. Efforts Data
Are my people meeting the wholesalers as they were doing previously? In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, medical representatives meet doctors and provide them with promotional material or, say, medications, and follow a similar course of action with chemists as well. Another sub-component of the Efforts data would be to see if the team is following previously successful strategies or not.
c. Consumer Insights & Brand Health
Datasets like Kantar provide valuable insights into customer behavior and psyche, how they can be expected to react to a particular promotional strategy, etc. It shares concrete data like Average Trip Size of a customer in a particular store.
Long-term focus areas such brand health, which is quite similar to brand perception, will also be kept a tab on.
3. Proactive or corrective action is undertaken
Once the reason is pinpointed, managers can then begin setting up and rolling out implementation strategies.
But before they can do that..
THE ISSUE OF WORKING WITH MULTIPLE DATASETS
Notice that we described the multiple datasets that managers work on in quite some detail.
This is to bring your focus to the issues concerning working on multiple datasets
- At the very least, time is wasted
- The communication to acquire such datasets is another challenge in itself
- Cleansing and merging the datasets is also a painstaking process
By the time the manager gets around to testing assumptions and conducting analysis, much of time has been wasted and the effort that should have gone into analysis and exploration is allocated just readying the dataset for analysis and exploration.
SOLVING THE ISSUE OF WORKING WITH MULTIPLE DATASETS
Explorazor is a data exploration and analysis tool that has been designed to specifically solve this issue for Brand & Sales teams. On Explorazor, managers see a single, integrated view of all their datasets which they can query using simple keywords and obtain data pivots in seconds. It literally puts all of the data under a single roof and makes it available at the fingertips of managers. All of the data would be stored on cloud, accessible via browser.
Of course, Explorazor is not entirely utopian; not every user will obtain access to all the datasets a company possesses. Rather, customized projects will provide access to all relevant datasets that a user needs for his daily, weekly or monthly activities.
For more details, you can visit the Explorazor website, and if you are interested in knowing more in detail, visit Explorazor docs.
- Preparing visualizations and presenting the decision
To reiterate, the first three steps in the decision-making process were:
- Looking for a piece of information, or a challenge being presented
- Exploration of possible reasons, which includes analyzing multiple datasets
- Undertaking proactive or corrective actions
The findings are then finally translated into a narrative to be presented to the management and/or the team. As a manager, you know what’s best for your company, and the all-important task of communicating forward-looking insights impactfully is best left to you. Explorazor seeks to remove the load of tasks that senior managers should not spend, or dare we say, waste their time in.
To speed up hypothesis testing, provide independence in ad-hoc analysis, and enable managers to spend more and more of their time on tasks that add value to their brands and companies is what Explorazor is built for.
To understand Explorazor better, contact us at support@vphrase.com and we’ll set up a short Explorazor demo for you. If you can’t find the time for that, we’ll be happy to share a one-pager with you for your reading. Enjoy!
Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor.