When discussing business analytics, most people don’t think of ancient Greek philosophy. However, great thinkers like Plato and Socrates left us with an enduring debate about knowledge vs. inspiration that resonates with today’s business leaders. They taught us that knowledge, the domain of the philosopher, is about reasoned inquiry, building a solid foundation of understanding, and asking questions to understand the world in a clear, logical way. Inspiration, on the other hand, is the poet’s realm. It’s spontaneous, like a lightning bolt of creativity that ignites innovation, often emerging when we least expect it.
The tale of Archimedes in his bathtub illustrates the distinction between knowledge and inspiration. Archimedes was tasked with determining whether the king’s crown was made of solid gold or a cheaper metal. He wrestled with the problem for days–taking measurements, weighing and analyzing the material, and building knowledge. It wasn’t until he stepped away from his desk to take a bath, that he noticed the water level rising, leading to his famous exclamation, "Eureka!" (I have found it). This insight led to the principle of buoyancy and changed our understanding of physics and engineering. Importantly, Archimedes' discovery wasn't just the result of data analysis, but rather a spontaneous flash of inspiration that led him to a novel relationship among all the facts he had gathered.
This age-old debate between knowledge and inspiration offers an illuminating perspective through which we can appreciate the role of data analytics in the modern business landscape. Today, executives lean heavily on analytics tools, trying to make sense of data with business intelligence (BI) dashboards that monitor operational KPIs, market trends, and financial metrics. These tools are indispensable for giving leaders a clear picture of their business and building knowledge, but they don’t necessarily inspire new ideas or solutions to problems. While data can tell us where we are and where we’ve been, it’s less adept at pointing us to where we could go.
This is the challenge for business analytics today: helping leaders stay on top of everyday business operations - the “knowns” - while revealing opportunities for growth and innovation - the “unknowns”. The goal is to bridge the gap between these two concepts, helping leaders use data not just as knowledge, but also as inspiration.
One of these leaders is our customer Theresa, a marketing leader at a global telecommunications provider. As Director of Growth Marketing, Theresa leads various initiatives to help her company acquire more customers. These include digital advertising, pay-per-click (PPC), retargeting, and email campaigns. She relies on analytics from her various marketing tools to understand lead acquisition and conversions, while keeping an eye on her ad spend.
“My goal is to track what we’re doing with PPC and see our numbers at the top of the funnel. Then look at all the ways we’re moving them through the funnel, whether that’s various remarketing ads at various stages, or layering in that email component where the right message is hitting the right person at the right time,” explains Theresa.
Knowing the performance of her various campaigns is helpful, but it’s just one part of the equation. She must also understand why specific tactics underperform and what to do about it. “Are certain leads not converting because the ads don’t resonate? Or is it the emails that don’t resonate?” asks Theresa, “And then really dive into the minutiae: Do I need to change the button color? Or are the visuals wrong? You’re asking yourself a ton of questions but only answering 10% of them.”
Brian is another one of our customers. He’s the VP of eCommerce at a branding and merchandising company that manages online storefronts and curates product lines for their clients. This is a very data-driven function, and Brian relies on analytics to help clients understand how to drive more business through their online store.
“Our clients want to know what marketing channels are working well right now, what product categories, and what size product assortment. They look to us to inform them on what’s happening, and they lean on us for all of the nuts and bolts of the execution,” says Brian.
To prepare for conversations with clients, vendors, and fulfillment partners, Brian reviews a set of BI dashboards every week. He looks at store sales across geographies, top-selling items, and fulfillment rates. He’ll also pull historical data like product and category trends.
For Theresa and Brian, BI enables them to find knowledge, but their clients and teams expect more than that–they look to them as experts who can point them in the right direction. They want to know what product assortments will work best, what price points will make more sense for specific market segments, and what discounts will be more effective at certain times of the year. Rarely do BI tools help them with these questions, so they must rely on experience and gut feeling to determine the way forward. However, gut feeling is fickle at best–how do we recreate these “Eureka!” moments without relying on pure luck to show us the solution?
As the ancient philosophers taught us, inspiration is a spontaneous burst of creativity that can’t be predicted or forced. But maybe we can use data to give it a little nudge.
“At a previous role,” shares Theresa, “I realized that we were losing 90% of our leads before they became sales opportunities. That was a hair-raising discovery because we knew they were qualified. So why were we losing them? It caused me to ring the alarm bells and bring a lot of stakeholders to the table.”
The brute force solution to this problem would have been to increase their ad spend by millions of dollars to meet their lead generation goals. Of course, this was an unrealistic approach. Instead, Theresa’s data helped her realize that a lack of email nurturing was the source of the problem.
“And within a quarter of just paying attention to the problem and adding a couple of steps, we saw a very notable improvement, and it had great downstream effects.”
But what happens when the solution to a problem is less clear? Theresa’s company has a vertical strategy, and her team is responsible for determining the right messaging for each vertical.
“There's a ton about each of the different verticals that we're in versus where we wanna go and what that customer needs to hear,” explains Theresa. ”I know that I’m missing a lot of nuance, specifically for new verticals that we're moving into.”
In Brian’s case, there is an industry-wide lack of attention to customer lifetime value. “It’s never been done in an effective or good way,” shares Brian. “We basically react and put products out based on what our clients are doing at that given time and hope people buy.”
Brian wants to use data to be more proactive and create new and innovative sales strategies, new collaborations, or new channels.
“It’s a huge area of opportunity for us, but it just doesn’t happen because we don’t have the resources or the time to do something about it.”
These examples illustrate that data is rarely enough. Analytics tools give Theresa and Brian a place to start, similar to Archimede’s initial attempts to gather data about the king’s crown. But the solutions necessarily lie outside the data, in a latent space of possibilities and relationships we haven’t quite discovered yet. That’s where inspiration comes in. Sometimes the solution will present itself spontaneously, like discovering a lack of email nurturing, but many times leaders could use more support to solve their business problems.
BI dashboards and analytics tools can only take leaders like Theresa and Brian so far. Getting more value out of these tools would require time, personnel, and expertise their teams simply don’t have. And, as we’ve seen, dashboards help them realize when there’s a problem, but they don’t help them figure out what to do about it.
This is where AI can help. It can act as a partner that finds inspiration and opportunity in business data to help leaders solve problems and reach their business goals. It can be someone to brainstorm alongside you, asking “Did you know?”, “Why is that?”, and “Have you considered?”, so you can find those inspirational moments that move your business forward.
“As someone who knows my success depends on getting the right message in front of a lead at the right time,” says Theresa, “I need a tool that can help me uncover how to better reach them. An AI tool could check my cognitive bias and prevent me from making mistakes.”
Brian experienced the possibilities of AI first-hand. He used AI to analyze his business’s historical sales data and discovered that there were certain times of the year when discounts performed significantly better.
“Before, we were kind of guessing. It was like, ‘We’re going to do a promotion this week, and let’s throw some discounting on top.’ But now we have much deeper insights into what’s actually worked. We know the exact times of the year and the level of discounts that perform best.”
Leaders like Theresa and Brian don’t need another BI dashboard or chatbot. They have business knowledge but need inspiration. In this new age of AI, business leaders who need to get more value from data will no longer be limited by a lack of time or resources. AI-powered solutions, like Wallabi, change the game for decision-making, blending the solid foundation of knowledge with the thrill of inspiration, guiding us not just through what we know but towards the exciting possibilities of what could be.
Feeling inspired? Contact us to learn more about Wallabi. We’d love to hear from you.
