Stop Data Hopping

If you're in sales or marketing then it's highly likely that like me you have a Data Hopping addiction.

That is, on any given day you hop between your different databases and reporting systems trying to understand your market and the sales you are making (or not!).

Now don't be shy about this addiction, it is a fairly common one, in some businesses I've worked in you spend a huge amount of time hopping between different systems (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Crystal Reports, Salesforce, HubSpot etc); I've found in the past that the only way to usually take control of all this is to dump a load of data into another application, usually Microsoft Excel or Access and wrangle the data from there, usually converting into another data source that has just the information that I need.

But it all soon spirals out of control as you start to ask questions that simple spreadsheet data manipulation can't answer (well either that or you end up with a spreadsheet full of formulas that only a rocket scientist could understand and dozens of VLOOKUPs), all this to get to answer some simple performance questions that are vital to your sales and marketing activity.

As a marketer I used to sit there sometimes and wonder when my job stopped been about discovering market insights and became about running my own data warehouse!

The best thing about working for a software company that develops data access middleware and in particular ODBC and JDBC Drivers is that I can now get access to the data I need, get data from multiple sources and pull them into either Excel or Access all in real-time.

No more wasting time, and no more dealing with out of date information, I now have access to the information I need when I need it, we now understand what's happening with our sales and marketing activities and better still we now know what levers we need to pull to improve business on a day by day, hour by hour basis if needed.

Seriously, take it from someone who doesn't necessarily understand the technology, but someone who understands business; talk to Easysoft, help your sales and marketing data workers get out of the data and report management game by enabling individuals to be self sufficient in their data preparation and analytics reporting; ultimately get your data in order and start making better business decisions.

Posted by Andy Scaife (Easysoft Limited, Marketing Manager).