Explaining the Importance of Information to a Company

A bit of what concerns me about society, our economy, is that this topic isn’t FAR more discussed.

HOW you explain the importance of information to a company is actually really simple, in my experience. You SHOW how information will impact the business.

I simply do this…

And then I ask…

What caused what happened at the first arrow?

What happened where the second arrow is pointing?

Overwhelmingly most of the time, companies have no answers.

I get dumbfounded looks.

And in turn, I can be a bit of a jerk… talking to the founder or executives of startups and companies, “what do you mean you don’t know?? How can you make any ethical or informed decisions about the business when all you can say to that is you don’t know?!?”

Too many consultants, articles, advisors, and even employees, get bogged down in trying to explain to a company the value of research, customer discovery, competitive analysis, interviews, surveys, etc. What you’re understandably asking is how we make companies appreciate why all that stuff matters.

The problem with focusing on things to do or investments that would have to be made to get the information, is that people naturally think, "what is the ROI of this budget you're asking for to do that stuff?" Rather, you explain it by challenging the ignorance that already exists, in a way that hits the bottom line for the business.

See it?

“So… whatever happened at the first arrow, more than doubled attention on what we’re doing and an opportunity to capitalize on it. But you don’t know why, or care why, how, or how to repeat it?!?”

“And whatever happened to cause everything to fall through the floor, doesn’t matter to know.”

“Damn…. okay… good luck!”

My work is mostly with startups and investors so I don’t have a quick take on how to easily do that for Companies, but the approach is the same: Google Analytics for Startups —- Should take you about an hour to put all that in place. And there should be no excuse not to. If only so you can take the data to the company and ask, “what happened?”