At the Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit in March 2013, John Hagel explained the emerging potential to improve business performance by making the invisible visible with analytics. His perspectives underscore the potential for analytics in B2B sales to drive improved performance. A summary of his two key points:
THE PRESSURE IS ON TO PERFORM [AND IT’S NOT GOING AWAY]
Technology has created enormous performance pressures. It’s been mounting for decades. On companies and the individuals who work in them. These pressures aren’t going to go away. Everything we do has to be in the context of a world of mounting performance pressure. Performance matters. Whatever we do needs to be tied back to metrics that make a difference to performance. It’s crucial to success.
WHEN THE INVISIBLE KEYS TO PERFORMANCE BECOME VISIBLE, BETTER PERFORMANCE BECOMES POSSIBLE
In Hagel’s view, those who find novel ways to drive performance, using ‘flow metrics’ that make the invisible visible, will be the winners in a world of mounting performance pressure. It will let leaders see the keys to performance more clearly. More importantly, it will equip individual employees to understand and improve their own performance. At the management level, such analytics enable a whole new set of leading indicators of performance. What’s emerging is an opportunity to take this further with ‘flow metrics’ that reveal patterns of interaction. These are leading indicators of operating performance. And operating performance has always provided leading indicators of financial performance.
Put another way, it’s hard to execution mistakes that you can’t see. When the non-obvious becomes clear for all to see, there’s both a chance to improve and the provocation to do so. Armed with both, you’ll be fixing problems others can’t see and achieving productivity lifts
that the less aware view as impossible to achieve.
