Intuitive Marketer™ Daily Insight #003 – Data-Driven vs. Data-Aligned, Part 2 

Part 2 in the “Data Driven” series. What’s the difference, and why it matters.

So we've been talking about being Data-Driven vs. Data-Aligned. If you missed that, click here to read it.

Meanwhile on LinkedIn yesterday, I found myself pontificating on this topic:

I like the idea of segmenting organizations based on their maturation from:

Data Unaware => Data Informed => Data Aligned

Where:

1) Data Unawareness is the organizational state of not really knowing or acting based on data. Data isn't even tracked, at least not deliberately. It just doesn't come up in the day-to-day very much.

2) Data Informed(-ness? lol) is the organizational state of at least knowing what you are and aren't tracking, and starting to make decisions based on it. This is where questions of CRMs, UTMs, etc start coming into the limelight.

3) Data Aligned is the organizational state where all metrics are defined (data dictionary!), tracked (CRM/technical setup), reported on (Databox, HubSpot, etc), and SHARED WITH THE ORGANIZATION. So sales and marketing are running off similar OKRs and metrics. Everyone in the organization understands what the goals are and has the ability to see metrics. Democratization of data and all that jazz. This is where tools like Databox really shine.

I think we need to be careful to avoid adpting so much "data-driven" identification that we ONLY use data to drive our decisions. For one thing, we can never know all the data, especially for lead attribution; some things will always be a directional guess at best. Second, the quality of an organization's data governance will determine how accurate and complete said data even is. Get this wrong, and you'll be making "data-driven" decisions on bad data. 

Finally, sometimes intuition and that middle-of-the-night insight is right.

Hi! My name is Lynn Swayze and I'm the Founder of The Intuitive Marketer™. I Help Expert Brands Apply the Intuitive Marketing Trifecta™ of Analytics, Intuition, and Psychology for Business Growth. Get this newsletter in your inbox here.