Analytics Start-Up Series - 2 of Many

I will continue with part 2 of the start up series and focus on the third part of the element wheel - New Product Design (Air)


New Product Design

What? By the time I had joined the team, we were still defining what we want to do, and what we don’t want to do. Analytics has come to connote not just data mining and predictive analytics, but even research analytics, product based analytics, dashboards, etc. We wanted to focus more on the marketing analytics, and that’s why we were MCoE.
However, the problem/uniqueness of our positioning was that we were focusing on a process driven analytics approach, while 90% of the listeners with different levels of analytics’ understanding had thought largely of product driven approach only. Even “SAS-skills” were “SAS” skills.

For whom? Moreover, we needed to decide which all verticals we will build our presence in. That’s tricky. Being small and new, you want to prove a point. You are ready for any project that comes your way. However, if you do your first project in healthcare with your key focus being FS, the next time you go to a client, you have a healthcare case study to talk about. If it’s an FS client, you neither want to own the case study, nor disown it. Boom!

Why? The bottomline for a sales guy remains – why would someone buy what you’re selling? Is there an identified need? Is it expressed? Would you need to educate the buyer? In the Indian market, for instance, Fractal Analytics, I think, has done a great job of educating the financial services sector about the need of and opportunities for analytics. There are similar examples elsewhere and in other industries too. Having said that, if we look at the analytics market today, the education is taken care of. The market does have an expressed need for analytics. If we take a closer look, the first industries to adopt analytics were financial services and telecom. And both these sectors loved keeping their data to themselves. They built strong in-house teams. However, things have changed in the last few years as firms have started engaging third party vendors (just as they adopted consulting/consultants as third party unbiased experts with a broader view) for analytics. But today, a lot of other sectors including Public Sector, Healthcare, etc. have emerged as buyers of analytics. Marketics, for instance, had more depth in FMCG than FS, given the ex-P&G background of its leadership team

Where? From a third party vendor point of view, almost everyone wants a piece of the US analytics market. The other markets have been slower to adopt analytics outsourcing. The other truth is the relatively crowded analytics vendor market in US. Net result, apart from some of the early movers like Fair Isaac, not a lot of vendors have been able to build a large scale. However, my MCoE stint taught me that there is a significant opportunity lying the Asian and European market as well, if you have the right connections, credibility and content.

Lessons learnt – Identify a market that you understand well, and where you have the credibility to sell. Sell only a bit, and understand it in depth, and avoid trying to be everything to everyone.