Don’t Let Perfection be the Enemy of Progress

In my last blog post, I wrote about how an organization maintains its focus on customer intelligence while closing the action gap – the place between realizing what you need to do and actually doing it. Now, let’s talk about how to increase your “operational tempo” once that gap has been closed.

Increasing Operational Tempo

Once the action gap is closed, you can begin to increase the operational tempo of the organization – the speed at which the organization executes – by speeding up the pace insights are generated, evaluated, prioritized, and acted upon. Operational tempo will depend on the customer intelligence infrastructure (if in-house) or on the customer intelligence vendor (if out-sourced).

If the Customer Intelligence infrastructure is in-house, operational tempo will depend on:

• Who “owns” the infrastructure: systems, or marketing, or both?
• Whether there is a dedicated team responsible for generating insights and leveraging the customer data to create customer intelligence
• Whether teams are organized by line of business or by functional area, or both
• Whether there is adequate staff to meet existing and projected needs
• Whether there are adequate channels of communication to allow insights to be prioritized by the business and put into action

If there is no in-house infrastructure, and the customer intelligence function is outsourced, then operational tempo will depend on the vendor’s:

• Domain expertise
• Industry expertise
• Staffing levels
• Infrastructure
• Commitment
• Communication

With increased operational tempo will come improved business results and an increased sense of confidence throughout the organization; now you are beginning to see real progress and will be able to refine your Customer Intelligence approach more rapidly with the increased feedback from marketing programs.

 3 Action Steps to Take Now

• Action Step # 1: Act. Pick a project that you know has been stalled due to “analysis paralysis” and decide to close the action gap. All progress starts with a small step in the right direction, and the most important thing you can do right now is to start. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress – get started.
• Action Step # 2: Know. “Acting” means “acting rationally.” When you act with customer intelligence, you are basing your marketing decisions on knowledge about your customers that will help you put the right message about the right product or service into the right customers’ hands at the right time. You don’t want to get trapped by “analysis paralysis,” but you do want your actions to be grounded in knowledge of your customers.
• Action Step # 3: Do it again. Operational tempo depends primarily not on a technological infrastructure, but on the willingness and desire to do it again – to continuously put customer intelligence to use in your organization and make it part of your day-to-day operational, financial, marketing, and customer service activities. If you’ve done it once, you can – and must – do it again.