Anxiety. Fear. Data.

Why do these things go together so often? In my experience when people are approached with data, they think of it as a language they don’t know how to speak. But speaking data is at the core of data culture, and building an inclusive data culture is something every company should be pursuing. 

A lot of what people call “data analytics” are just glorified spreadsheets. These can be very hard to move away from, so we’ve taken a baby steps approach at my company. We replaced or made new versions of certain reports to provide a deeper dive or a different way of looking at the data, but usually we first slip those new views into the existing view people were accustomed to. That way they have their familiar view plus the new way of looking at things. You can almost see the lightbulbs going on, as if people are saying to themselves, “Okay, there’s that number down there. I see what’s going on. Actually, that’s much easier to see than a wall of numbers.”

This evolution is important, because a core pillar of a strong data culture is that everyone shares the same version of the truth. With the old tools at our company, people would run reports and put them in Excel spreadsheets and slice and dice the numbers with very little consistency. Now we have a source of truth such that everyone can look at the same numbers and know that those numbers are the same for them as for the next person – and that they’re being calculated in the same way.

Bringing data culture to the C-Suite

We’re quite fortunate in our data culture because both our co-CEOs are invested in analytics as a way to move the company forward and win in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It’s always great when leadership at the highest level can say, “This is how we do things around here now, and maybe we’re not the best at it yet, but we’re going that direction. We’re going to keep doing this until we get it right.” 

This kind of expectation drives new behaviors when leadership expects you to come to them with more than numbers, whether you’re a sales leader or the transportation manager. This is the kind of dynamic that pushes out through a culture. In fact it creates that culture. The CEO’s job is to be responsible for creating and maintaining the culture of a company because all eyes are on them as the highest level of leadership. As they do, the company does. In the data realm that helps make things a lot easier, but it doesn’t necessarily mean everybody’s excited to do it. So as data leaders we still have our work cut out for us as we guide everyone in the same direction. 

Getting the C-suite off the sidelines

In my experience, part of turning C-suite executives into advocates for a data culture is to remind them that yes, these analytics tools have a cost – the cost of infrastructure, of data tools, or the cost per user to access the tools – but so does a semi-trailer truck. So does a building. Data tools aren’t just money going out the door. Everyone is getting benefit from them. We’re using these tools to find more sales, or better deals on procurement, or efficiencies in the warehouse, or a longer lifespan for our trucks. Data is not a cost center, but a way to make money and create value through analytics. 

This gentle insistence has paid off at my company. One of our CEOs recently said to me that of all the productivity tools we’ve spent money on, data analytics tools are probably the number one time-saver. He is only a few clicks away from almost anything he needs. I count that as a big win.

Three ways to enlist your C-suite

How do you get your C-suite to join the data party? Here are a couple of pointers.

  1. Remind them how influential they are. C-suite members generally but CEOs in particular are responsible for creating and maintaining the culture of a company. All eyes are on them. So when they’re vocal about something, it often makes its way through the whole company. Remind them that the spotlight is on them and that they’re the figurehead for the company when it comes to topics like analytics.
     
  2. Show them what they’re missing. The difference between a monthly report on the numbers and the ability to have those numbers every day is quite a draw. The ability to be alerted proactively when a customer hasn’t ordered for three days instead of noticing almost a month later that the customer’s sales dropped by half compared to the previous rolling 12 months is powerful. So show your C-suite the things that they didn’t know – or didn’t know that data tools could help demonstrate. 
     
  3. Start small. Produce distribution is still a very old school industry where a lot of deals are made with handshakes and phone calls. If you’re part of an industry that lives in a fairly low-tech world, you don’t have to go all in with analytics. You can start with that one person on the finance team who reports to the CFO. Imagine the power of them saying, “Hey, look at this cool tool we have. We can do our monthly reporting a lot easier with this.” You don’t have to spend a million dollars and invest in huge amounts of infrastructure. You can start with a pilot, learn from your mistakes along the way, and scale as you figure it out.  

Remember, one of the biggest goals you’re working toward for the C-suite and the rest of the organization is to make the whole company more competitive. When you drive better pricing on the procurement side that you can pass on to customers, and those customers are happy, you get more business. Success is also about using data to make internal customers happier so they keep coming back and showing better results. No one in the C-suite can disagree with this sort of reasoning. And step by step, it all adds up to a data culture.