The most successful data-driven marketers rely on specific insights and recommendations from their analytics teams to optimize their strategies and boost performance. Whether these analytics teams are internal departments or external vendors, the goal should be the same: to equip decision makers with the most accurate, timely, and — above all — actionable information to increase performance and operational efficiency.
With so many potential solutions — coming from just as many consultants willing to take on an opportunity — how can you be sure you are choosing the best solution for your marketing need? Or better yet, how can you be confident that your chosen solution has taken into consideration all of your most valuable interests and desired outcomes?
The truth is you can never be 100% certain that a specific solution will achieve all of your desired results, while simultaneously balancing your vested interests. However, with the right strategic partner, you can be confident you are implementing the best solution possible. This can be accomplished through establishing the most valuable asset of any kind in an analytics setting: trust.
Trust goes a long way, on each side of a business relationship; and serves as one of the most significant drivers of value in analytics. This is derived from its ability to effectively provide results which are beneficial to all parties involved. When honest and open collaboration occurs, where constructive feedback and skilled, experiential guidance flows back and forth throughout the process; trust serves as an irreplaceable promoter of building good between the strategic partners involved.
Although building confidence and promoting trust is highly desirable in the fiercely competitive analytics landscape today, it is not always easy to achieve. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as this serves as a formidable obstacle to dismiss potentially adverse situations.
So, how do strategic partners install confidence and gain each other’s trust in analytics settings? KPMG, the professional services company, has developed the following model for “Trusted Analytics”:
The model above includes the “Four Anchors of Trust in Data and Analytics.” These four anchors are Resilience, Quality, Effectiveness, and Integrity. They are all incredibly important by themselves, and serve as significant components of establishing trust in strategic partnerships. These four anchors should not just be optimized individually, but balanced in such a way that allows for trust to be effectively established, gained, and maintained through the entirety of the partnership.
What can we learn and apply from this model? We can learn that in order to achieve trust within our analytics partnerships, which allows for honest and open collaboration to occur; that we must look at our processes to ensure those are emphasizing these four anchors to achieve a high level of trust, both internally and externally. In terms of application, a continual process improvement (CIP) plan could be utilized, along with integrating valuable stakeholder feedback, to ensure that efforts are achieving incremental improvement. This will ultimately lead to greater value creation over a longer period of time, supporting analytics thought leadership.
Overall, domain expertise is going to be a desirable characteristic to have in any analytics partner; however, the combination of domain expertise and trust will always be a greater long-term driver of goal achievement. Having confidence in every function of your analytics strategy is critical for this success.
If you would like to find out how we can help, please contact us today.
