Solving Business Problems with Data: Christian Steinert

This week I’m introducing a series of this newsletter called Solving Business Problems. In this series, I will feature a story about a data professional solving a real business problem with data.

Our first case study features Christian Steinert and his experience helping a roofing company organize their sales funnel

The Problem

Christian is a data consultant who specializes in providing analytics solutions for roofing companies. He recently helped a client solve an important business problem.

The problem? Their sales funnel was unclear.

Both the Sales and Digital teams were involved in the sales process. The Digital team was responsible for creating the process for collecting information on leads. The Sales team was responsible for executing this process.

Each team was just trying to do their job. But the Digital teams’ process frustrated the Sales team’s ability to do their job.

We’ve all seen this before…

1. A process is created.

2. It slows people down.

3. Startups need to move fast.

4. Data quality suffers

But the misalignment didn’t just impact the data quality. It also impacted the company’s operations as a whole.

There was no holistic picture of the company’s relationship with its prospects or customers. The poor data quality made it difficult for the company's understand where customers and prospects were in their buyer's journey.

Poor data quality was impacting the roofing company’s ability to operate and grow efficiently.

The Process

This problem wasn’t clear to Christian at first. To gain clarity, he started the project by working with the client on a business data model (BDM).

Christian uses BDMs to help technical and non-technical contributors align on how the business’ operations produces and consumes information. His plan was to use the BDM to help bring clarity to this company’s sales process.

He included all relevant stakeholders from various teams including Sales, Digital, and Finance. Together they worked through and documented all of the steps from each department to convert a lead into a customer.

This process took several days. But through this process there were some “ahas.”

• Naming matters - Data professionals know this. But the BDM process made this truth clear to the operators in the business. Inconsistent naming for sales and marketing events was affecting all teams’ abilities to work together to efficiently serve their customers
  

• Everyone’s a Leader - Any one contributor can create information for an operation. The team realized how the quality of the information they were producing was impacting their ability to use information to better communicate with prospects and customers.
  

• Data as a Solution - Data provides many benefits to an organization even before they start reporting. The BDM exercise was a great example Christian’s client. When everyone understands how data is produced and consumed, they have a better understanding of how their work impacts the entire business and its customers.

The key takeaway here is that Christian did not need to do much to provide business value. He didn’t need to shove a dashboard down anyone’s throat.

Instead, he took a data modeling exercise he was familiar with from his technical background, and used it to discover his clients’ business needs. Not only was he able to gather requirements, but he also helped bring clarity to the entire team.

The clarity alone already delivered immense value to his client. He was focused on the requirements of the business, not on the requirements for his data solutions.

The Solution

At the beginning of the engagement, Christian didn’t know what the client needed, and neither did the client. They just knew they had a problem: there was no visibility into how leads became customers.

Remember, this was a roofing company that Christian was helping. This wasn’t AirBnB or Doordash. They weren’t looking for an enterprise data warehouse or self-service analytics (at least at the time). They just needed clarity.

Data is an excellent visibility tool. Visibility and clarity provide a lot of value to a business. It helps everyone involved stay in their lane and focus on what they do best.

This story is a great example of how data fundamentals can provide value anywhere information flows. It also reconfirms that data problems are people problems. The BDM exercise was a success because Christian was able to bring leaders together to align on a source of truth.

That’s all for now. If you want to reach out to Christian, you can message him on LinkedIn or through his website.

P.S. Do you have a good story of how you used data to solve a business problem? Reply this email and let me know! I’d love to feature you in this newsletter.