I want you all to throw out whatever definition you have in your heads for analytics—just for a moment—so we can talk about what analytics should mean. If there’s one thing I’d like to bring across to you it’s that analytics is about looking ahead—about being predictive. What most of us do today with analytics is report. We look at what we have already done and report on it. Analytics is much more than that. It is about making future decisions with more certainty of success.

And in these times, we must make the right choices in marketing—choices that will translate into revenue. There simply isn’t any room for mistakes right now. So the timing of the online briefing that I’ll be doing on December 16 about marketing analytics is pretty good.

In our presentation we are going to talk about three things you can do today to start improving your ability to predict. First, we’re going to talk about methodologies for analyzing marketing programs’ success before you have to commit the big bucks. Second, we will talk about why finance is a key player in helping you improve your analytics program. And we will talk about how you can start to shift the culture of marketing and your business from what I call a talent approach to what our friend and colleague Tom Davenport, who recently presented at our annual conference, calls a fact-based culture. By the way, Tom has written a book called Competing on Analytics that you should check out if you haven’t already. I’ll also reveal some selected findings from our recent survey on marketing analytics.

I think it’s important to distinguish analytics from metrics because I see these two get jumbled together a lot. Analytics is essentially gathering data and looking at it to gain insight, while metrics are the descriptive performance measures that we use to gauge progress.

The goal of both metrics and analytics, of course, is not just to track and measure marketing programs, but to build business success. To that end, we have created what we call ITSMA’s Analytics Best Practice Model. I won’t go through all of the elements of it in detail here, but these are the basic goals:

• One is to find and coordinate the data we need across the organization so that we can start to make better decisions across all of marketing and the business, not just in selected pockets.
• Second, we want to create a link with finance—where the analytics experts are—to start to look at marketing programs as part of a greater whole. it’s great to optimize within marketing, but as we all know, marketing is just one piece of business success.
• Third, we want to create a fact-based culture.

We’ve all heard of gut-based decision making, right? I get this vision of a fat guy with a cigar chomped in his mouth and his suspenders between his thumbs barking about how “My gut has never failed me yet!”

That’s not it at all. Marketers don’t operate from the gut, we operate from talent. We rely on our talent to develop creative programs that will, in general, be successful.

What we have not done in our organizations is to make room for the facts before we start to exert our creative energies. We tend to think that we have hired good people and they should simply go forth and do their best.

But we need to create the organizational patience—the time and tolerance—to gather the facts about the prospects of success before we go forward. And that means that we need to change our thinking to be more like financial analysts and engineers.

More left-brained, in other words.

Good car companies don’t skip crash testing of their new models, even if the new model is not much different than the previous ones that have done just fine in testing.

What do you think?