Reagan, what is your guilty pleasure snack? My guilty pleasure snack. Oh my goodness. That would have to be Buffalo chicken dip with some protein chips.
I don't know if that's really a snack to me it is, but that is like what's been on my food brain lately. I love that. Great answers. Really, you passed the food test.
Welcome back to Stacking Girls' Snacks. I'm Steph Crenola and I am here with Director of Demand Gen for Refine Labs, Reagan-Dodson. We are talking about building a data democracy. We have gone over what it is and why it's important, where to start and how to organize your data.
And today we're going to get into communication with leadership. So if you feel like your company needs to start on this journey of building a data democracy, how would you recommend Reagan someone take that initiative to communicate their lack of data access? So how I would approach this is I would go and I would go and get every one of the C-suite people or marketing later sales leaders in a Zoom room. And I would say we need to talk about our data.
Right now it's a mess. We are dealing with duplicates, outdated records, missing fields and inconsistent data points across marketing and sales. This is just not an operational issue. It's actively hurting our performance and it's wasting money, really doubled down on wasted money.
That's what they care about and really tell them the bottom line. Here it is. One, dirty data costs us money. We're bleeding budget on bad targeting, wasting time on inefficient processes.
Two, bad data is killing sales productivity. So sales is spending more time cleaning up CRM records and closing deals. Three, misaligned data means misaligned teams. We can't even agree in a board meetings or like pipeline review meetings or any of that on what's happening in our funnel because marketing and sales are misaligned because they're working from the same bad data.
So that's how I would start the conversation and I would pull in receipts from any past projects that you have done or what you're like say you're coming in and you're taking over for someone else. What did they do that didn't work and what have you tried and what are the band aids and really come up with a proposal that is really going to be attractive to the C-suite for sure. Hey, this is a pivotal opportunity to gain a competitive advantage, right? We have a data democracy.
It's no longer a nice to have. It's a growth lever. It's really going to help with faster smart decision making. I would kind of start there, but I think sometimes that this topic gets scirted around so much just because the C-suite especially does not want to invest in resources on cleaning up the CRM.
We see it all the time and it's just going to continue costing you money. Yeah, I guess that difference between asking for the conversation or proposing it rather than sitting everyone down and saying we need this is a really, it feels like a minimal difference when you're explaining it, but in real time it's so much more effective to say we need this. We're losing money. This will help.
Yes, definitely. We'll need to address those stakeholder concerns for sure, but you need to be proactive in that approach. And how does that look for different teams? So how can I'm not talking about marketing and sales ganging up to sit the C-suite down, but how does this look across different teams?
How can they work together or overlap to make consistent communication? I think that's that unified go-to-market approach that we always talk about, right? Chris talks about it all the time. And I think starting there too as well, getting everyone in a room.
I worked at my previous company. We addressed go-to-market issues that way and just really got everyone in a room and had that listening tour where the third party consultant came in and was like, hey, let's just have a venting session. And I think that's a good way to start. It's a good way to build trust with each other.
A lot of the times you're going to understand that that friction point that you're experiencing is what your other counterparts and other departments are experiencing as well. And I wonder how much of that feeling of competition comes from not having access to the other team's data, because if you're sharing everything, then it's going to feel more like a team effort rather than a head-to-head competition. Exactly. Exactly.
It's like, and it's always that marketing is looking at this and sales is looking at this. And a lot of times, no one ever cares about customer success and support metrics, which are really, really important if you want to retain customers or have them renew or your customers telling you all the data points that you need, especially when it's products related, and they normally just get chopped off and not even considered. So I think it's really important for customer facing teams to be considered as well in this conversation. That's super important.
And as you said, often overlooked. So if you are in leadership, we've talked about an individual employee advocating for themselves for this data democracy. If you are in leadership, how can you cultivate an environment where data democratization is prioritized, whether it's communicating with other leadership in the same way you mentioned at the top of this episode, or just creating an environment where people feel empowered to share and cross over teams. Clean up the data, getting your viewpoints on what they want to see.
And I'm a big proponent of each team, especially in marketing, of embark on these projects several times. There's like, okay, field marketing team, events team, what do you want to see? Well, we want to see how many leads we generated from our event and what our attendance percentage was. We want to know how much we invested in it.
Well, so that's what you want to see on your dashboard. So they're going to have their own dashboard that they're going to be looking at, and they're going to feel empowered to be able to share screenshots or whatever in any type of presentation that they'll have with their sales counterparts, with their leader, because they have complete access to this beautifully made dashboard made by their marketing ops team, right? And they don't have to think about it. It takes away the stress of a field marketer having to like, okay, I got to go to my marketing ops team and ask them to pull a report, and it's all this raw data, and I don't know what to do.
I don't know anything about pivot tables or interpreting data. Yes, it's telling me that I got 55 leads from this campaign. What does it actually mean? What does success look like?
As a leader, it's your responsibility to help them understand what success metrics look like and really defining what those KPIs and goals are. Incredible. Reagan, this has been so informational, so full of detail and advice that I hope everyone who's watching takes and runs with and uses immediately. Thank you so much for all of your time in this set of episodes.
Yes, thank you, Stephanie. And thank you everyone for watching. We'll see you all next time.