And where is that customer data?

1.2 form submissions a day.

$100 spend a week.

100/7 = $11.90 per lead?

Are these leads?

If one out of every 7 books a meeting and 1 out of 4 of those turn into customers…

Isn’t it (rounding down) 1 lead a week?

And one customer every 4 weeks?

13 blocks of 4 in a year.

What exactly is a lead here?

How do we know that these people turned into customers?

Did someone label them?

Did they use a credit card and the transaction is recorded in the database as a stage change?

How did it get the transaction get put into your data?

Where does it show up?

How does your team (or you) know?

So we turn our attention to the marketing funnel, marketing landing page… which is really a series of pages with individual stats.

How do you know what the actual flow looks like?

How do you know that 4 of the page views are actually unique?

“Well Google Analytics told me!”

Or

“My CRM told me!”

“They have to be right right?”

Could be.

Does that mean you know? Does it mean you really know?

So in one place in your tool (what ever system you use), you get infomation about when people show up.

In another part of your tool, you get information about how people flow through the pages you are serving them right?

What if you could put it all together in one place?

Excel ➜ Tableau?

Excel ➜ CSV ➜ Looker

As soon as you start talking about THIS… bring it all together. It shows up as a fragmented collection of random bits of code.

And then you start working on figuring out what’s important.

The problem is that by the time you are start working on this (because every thinks it’s fine until it breaks down…), it’s not just a conundrum. I wouldn’t call it a conundrum wrapped in cipher wrapped in an enigma but it feels close.

So we start mapping it. We think.

To build something. We just don’t know what yet.

And then there are gaps (there always will be because we are dealing with humans) and what do we do about those?

Or

Oh no… we’re hosed. Give it up.

Wait are we?

Confusion.

“I know maybe someone has figured this out!” We say.

And then start looking for a way to off load that mental load.

And there are some potentials out there.

And then what you find is…

NONE OF THOSE WORK TOGETHER.

And now you are right back to the beginning.

Disconnected data in disconnected systems spread all of the disconnected cloud doing what ever disconnected systems do when they are disconnecting YOUR stuff.

And then…

Maybe you think, “Oh wait! We’ll just build it.”

And the team costs $500,000 a year in salary alone.

And the timeline… let’s just agree it’s more than $500k.

(and the CPU gets hotter and hotter, the glow embers in a campfire. The heat ripples the air. And for a moment everything stabilizes and you hope everything is going to be ok even though you know its the moment before the avalanche starts. And then liquid metal starts seeping across the pine green motherboard scorching everything in in it’s path — a flood of rushing liquid rolling over the landscape devouring every circuit in it’s path)

Disconnected data. Ugg.