The Transforming Insight podcast is back this week! Our 55th episode, the first of Season 8, it's called the Value of valuation and can be downloaded for free here.
Back in episode 52, we explored the importance of Insight teams building a commercial foundation for their work.
We said we should begin by assembling 'core stats', then develop a 'business blueprint', overlay key insights about customer behaviour and its effect on revenue and costs, and summarise our knowledge with an executive presentation.
Where do we go next if we want optimise the impact of our work?
Some years ago I interviewed Sue Whelan Tracey, former commercial director for one of the UK's big four banks, and at that time a director at Moneyfacts, an NHS health trust, and a major diabetes charity. Sue told me how much she tried to champion the use of customer insight in every organisation she worked with, but she thought that we didn't always make it easy for ourselves.
Her observation was that senior people in business always speak the language of finance, and that shapes their perception of business issues.
But when they ask the Insight team for help addressing those issues, we respond in a different language - sometimes the language of the customer, sometimes the language of research methodology or analysis.
Sue's frustration was that Insight teams know so much that could help their organisations, but by failing to translate our knowledge, findings, recommendations and opinions into the right language, we are failing to optimise our impact.
And worse, our organisation misses out and doesn't leverage its investment in Insight.
Customer and market knowledge, said Sue, is far too important - and expensive - for us to leave it to senior decision-makers to translate our findings into their language 'through the filter of their own ignorance'.
So this episode of our podcast is all about the importance of placing a financial value on the projects we work on, the observations we make, and the recommendations we put forward.
It's often easier than we might think, and the potential benefit is enormous.