Insights for all, on-demand: the new normal to stimulate revenue growth?

Democratisation of Insight

Data abounds in FMCG organisations, yet real insight is a precious resource. As mentioned in our previous article, one of the biggest constraints on the development of performance insight is the human capital required to transform data into insight.

The term ‘insight’ has been diluted in recent years – with pretty much any data being positioned as ‘insight’. However, data alone does not drive decisions. We need to interrogate and make sense of the data in order to decide on appropriate action. At Interrodata we would describe a revenue performance insight as a ‘penetrating discovery that can be applied in the business to impact sales performance.’ In short, insights help decision-makers to understand what’s happening so that they can intervene effectively to drive growth.

Such insights do not reveal themselves easily. Today, they require intensive human work to connect, interrogate and ‘follow trails’ in the data to understand what is really driving or restraining performance.

There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine—but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.
Nate silver, The Signal and the noise

The ‘objective truth’ to which Nate Silver refers is insight. The challenge is how to get these objective truths into the right hands at the right time, in order to inform decisions.

The ‘expert’ bottleneck

The idea of democratising insight or moving towards a ‘self-serve’ model is not new. Today, insight and category teams can often be regarded as the ‘font of all knowledge’, to whom all requests for both data and insight are sent. Everyone is ‘busy’ but skills are not being used optimally – and not everyone can be served in a timely manner. The need for ‘better, faster insights for all’ has never been more apparent.

3 reasons democratising your insights will drive revenue growth

There are multiple reasons why this change would be beneficial to organisations. However, they all lead to one, crucial, result: revenue growth.

1. Empowering your people

Knowledge is power. If you can arm your teams with relevant inspiration, guidance and substantiated recommendations you build confidence to make bold, informed business decisions.

2. Extending influence

Thought-leadership with internal and external customers is achieved when recommendations are supported by solid evidence. By democratising insight, we can extend the influence of business teams to achieve beneficial outcomes.

3. Speed to action

Speed is in FMCG’s DNA. It says it on the tin. Accelerating insight generation is key to building agility in the business and enabling faster decision making. This will allow an organisation to capitalise on opportunities or mitigate threats more efficiently, driving market share and revenue growth.

Attention needed

When it comes to systems that create efficiencies, we have witnessed huge progress across several functions, especially finance, sales and marketing. Now is the time when Insights come of age – no longer the domain of a few highly skilled experts, but broadly available at the point of decision-making.

Meanwhile, insights teams are freed up to inspire and guide the longer-term strategic choices of the organisation, no longer shackled to daily data extraction and processing.

Tangible progress in this space can happen in a matter of weeks – is it time to take your next step towards insight democratisation?

If you would like more actionable advice on how to get started on this journey check out our eBook on Insights-on-Demand. Or get in touch using the form below. One of our representatives will be in touch to answer any questions you have.