Listen to customers when building a company

Return on investment and A/B testing: two big value drivers in what we will build.

Today we had an exciting meeting with a prospect (kept confidential). It confirmed two things our data should do in the future.

Listen

When you build a company, meeting potential customers is always exciting. That is where the rubber hits the road.

There is one golden rule: listen. Listen to what they say, and to what they don't say.

Honest about our data

We told our prospect openly where we are. Our data is not ready yet, for two reasons:

01
Not clean yet
We are still in the mapping phase: classifying every drink on every ticket line.
02
Not representative yet
We don't yet cover enough points of consumption (POCs, or venues) to be statistically representative.

"We can't measure our campaigns"

The prospect told us that one of the most frustrating things about not having data is that they can't measure the success of a marketing campaign.

They have estimates from their sales team, and they can see whether the numbers are improving. But the data they are looking for is far more precise and far more up to date.

Return on investment: before and after

We discussed what our data could do in the future. Imagine having weekly sales data broken down by postal code, type of venue, type of drink, hour of the day, and what it was consumed with.

With that level of detail, there is a good chance you can show sales before and after a marketing event, and measure the difference. Accurately and on time.

Before and after a campaign — Illustration, not real data.

A/B testing in the real world

Besides, you can run different test campaigns in different but comparable areas. That makes A/B testing possible: you compare the results and see which campaign really works.

Area A

Campaign 1

Area B

Campaign 2

Two different but comparable areas, each with its own campaign. Illustration, not real data.

The future is exciting

Measuring campaigns and testing them side by side would profoundly change how companies think about, and carry out, their marketing and sales strategies.

We are not there yet. But we listened, and we know what to build. We are working on it!

Key takeaways

Measure the return on a marketing campaign, by comparing sales before and after, accurately and on time.
Enable A/B testing, by running different campaigns in different but comparable areas.
Our data isn’t ready for this yet. But the future is exciting, and we are working on it.

Want to measure what your campaigns really return?

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