The art of the analytics deal

How can you sell “analytics” if you don’t know the value of the product or service you’re trying to sell and you don’t know anything about sales? That’s a problem many analysts face, and it’s a problem several contributors tackle in this issue of Analytics magazine.

Evan Stubbs, who literally wrote the book on the subject (“The Value of Business Analytics: Identifying the Path to Profitability”), says that the “best-guarded secret in business analytics is that, in practice, its success comes down not only to organizational culture but also to the ability of managers to successfully sell the value of analytics.” In our cover story, Stubbs outlines four common mistakes that analysts make when defining the value of analytics.

Concludes Stubbs: “Dealing with [the] data deluge requires … developing the ability to selectively process information based on value, not sequence. It requires, more than anything else, the realization that brute-force and manual effort are, in the long run, an impossible solution. Quite simply, it requires the effective application of analytics.”

The critically important but often overlooked ability to “sell” analytics is one of a long list of skills David Leonhardi explores in “Soft skills: The ‘killer app’ for analytics.” Leonhardi classifies “soft skills” as “the right-brain interpersonal/personal skills that cover a large continuum of proficiencies” such as communication, conflict resolution and negotiation, creative problem-solving, strategic thinking and team-building.

A business strategist in Boeing Commercial Airplane’s Strategy Integration Group, Leonhardi builds on an article by Freeman Marvin and William Klimack (“Six soft skills every analyst needs to know”) that appeared in the January/February 2011 issue of Analytics. In his article, Leonhardi outlines six new abilities (design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning) that have a role in the “selling” process.

Making the sale is one thing, making an impact is another. In his Executive Edge column, Chris Fry, managing director of Strategic Management Solutions, examines why so many analytics projects fail to reach their full potential and offers three strategies to close the gap between analytics and action. As Fry notes, “The challenge for many of us who love analytical work is that it can be easy to get lost in the excitement of looking at data or building a model and lose track of the critical importance of enabling decisions and actions from our work.”