Building Data Skills: Roundtable Breakfast

How do you build data literacy in marketing?

To meet both customer and senior management expectations, modern marketing organizations need to be agile, data-driven, and automated. That begs some questions:

• How do you develop the necessary competencies in your marketing organization?

• Where do you start?

• How can you support the success of the project?

At our most recent roundtable breakfast, we discussed this with marketing and sales managers, digital managers, and heads of data.

Frieso Aeschbacher, Digital Customer Interaction Program Manager at BKW Energie, and Jérôme Koller, Head of Data & Analytics at Mobiliar, contributed their real-world experience and best practices. Robert Schumacher, Director at gateB and pioneer in data-driven marketing, moderated the discussion.

Supplementing the A/B/C segments with behavior-based clusters at BKW

Today, BKW segments its customers into clusters based on behavioral and interaction data. The calculated data insights deliver added value to the product management and marketing teams, allowing them to better adapt communication to customer behavior. For example, BKW now offers regular webinars to customers whose behavior indicates that they want a lot of communication.

Frieso Aeschbacher explained at the roundtable how he used existing data to implement this new approach and, in doing so, gave new meaning to the topic of data-based clustering and segmentation in the B2B environment.

A few key takeaways from the discussion:

• Involve stakeholders (e.g., sales) early in the project and use their input to iteratively improve the outcome from the data analysis.

• Give sales as much freedom as possible in the use and application of data insights.

• Create physical proximity between sales and analytics. This helps in mutual understanding and in the speed of optimizations.

At BKW, the behavior-based segmentation and the resulting insights opened up new possibilities in the design of offers and the overall sales process.

From zero to hero at Mobiliar

Over the past six years, Jérôme Koller has driven the development of data expertise at Mobiliar and played a major role in shaping it. It all started with open-ended exploration. Today, the company uses data in an increasingly targeted way to add value for its customers. Jérôme told the roundtable how he and his team went about it, sharing what they learned along the way.

We have summarized some of these discoveries here:

• Finding and taking advantage of opportunities requires some courage, especially at first.

• Create facts quickly. For example, use behavioral data to show when and how customers interact with the company. This often works best with visualizations

• Focus centrally on the "how" with a hub-and-spoke approach. Leave the "what" to the decentralized users of data insights and, in doing so, create greater buy-in.

• Imaginative but concrete work with the data is crucial at the start.

Use the right data to strengthen customer relationships

gateB helps companies from a wide range of industries overcome the challenges of a fragmented customer data environment, from internal data silos to a lack of resources and data usage. Learn more here .