Intelligence or Actionable Intelligence: Which Do You Have?

What is intelligence? With the rise of AI, “intelligence” as a term has come to cover any number of tasks, outputs, or processes, so we’ll leave the wider definitional debate to the philosophers and narrow ours. In our world, the distinction that actually matters is simple: having intelligence vs. being able to act on it.

Nearly every client we work with comes to us with some level of business intelligence already in place. However, the reality is that most organizations don’t have a reporting problem. They have a decision problem.

They can see what is going on in their business, but they can’t confidently answer “what should we do?” “Who should do it?” “What impact can we expect?”

Every company has data and dashboards, metrics and KPIs. And still, so many are left asking:

Now what?

Intelligence vs. Actionable Intelligence

Intelligence tells you what is happening. Actionable intelligence tells you what to do next and how to do it.

If it doesn’t translate into a decision, ownership, and a measurable revenue outcome, it’s not actionable.

There are a hundred different metrics to track in every industry, and probably another hundred that are specific to your company. However, unless you understand the root behavioral drivers of your business, just seeing the Average Order Value on your sales dashboard every morning likely isn’t moving the needle. You have intelligence without action.

That’s why at RevGen, we take a holistic, zoomed-out view of revenue generation. Only by first understanding the data, technology, processes, and people involved in the overall revenue functions can we find the levers to pull and buttons to press that will unlock, grow, or protect your revenue. Then, we work with our clients to fix broken processes, clean and enhance data, enable with AI, and manage the change so that revenue generation can run more smoothly.

Turning Intelligence into Action

What does this look like in practice? To expand upon the Average Order Value (AOV) example, it means that knowing AOV is directly impacted by baseline pricing, any price-reducing promotions, the number of products purchased in a single order (cross-selling), and whether your customers are being upsold into higher quality products.

Right there, we have identified four different levers impacting one single metric that’s tied to overall revenue. These levers all have data, technology, process, and people components to them as well.

In this hypothetical, let’s say that we pinpoint the root cause of a dwindling AOV as poor cross-selling. First, to improve cross-selling, we could build a machine learning model to compare which products are most frequently purchased together. To do this, we would ensure we have clean, usable data on historical purchases.

Then, once we have that output—several products to pair together—we turn this into an AI-driven recommendation engine for the website, as well as build training to bring the sales agents up to speed on better ways to cross-sell using these frequent pairings. None of this is revolutionary, in fact it’s the basis for Amazon’s “Frequently Bought Together” section, however, it might just be the low-hanging fruit that can make a real revenue impact for our hypothetical business.

Actionable Intelligence in the Real World

Recently, we had a financial services client who needed to make some hard decisions about their branch network and physical footprint to protect their revenue from rising costs without causing upheaval for their customer base and tanking their reputation in the industry. While they had the financial data, as well as qualitative data, to point towards branch performance, they didn’t have the confidence to act. What were they to do when Branch B had higher overall revenue than Branch A, but Branch A had much better customer satisfaction scores across a key territory?

They had intelligence, but not actionable intelligence.

RevGen’s team of experts took the data and goals the client already had and built a pilot program to test six different branch optimization scenarios (including consolidation, repositioning, and coverage trade-offs). First, we built a holistic branch scorecard, then we modeled each scenario using a five-lens decision matrix. This gave us a clear winner which we then translated into an implementation roadmap, change plan, and communication strategy.

Our recommendation protected their current revenue levels, while projecting a 32% net annual operating expense reduction. We also found that they had huge potential revenue in an untapped market. All by simply translating the intelligence they already had into an actionable framework.

You can read about the process in more detail here.

Making Intelligence Work for You

Revenue generation can often feel like too big of a problem to unravel without a miracle new product or unexpectedly viral advertising. Just thinking about the mass of data, technologies, and stakeholders involved can be intimidating. However, without considering it as a whole, companies often struggle to find sustainable, long-term revenue.

The good news is that having business intelligence is half the battle. And more good news is that RevGen can help you turn that intelligence into action.

Contact us today to speak to one of our actionable intelligence experts and let’s get you on a path to reliable revenue generation.

Regina is passionate about using her expertise in transformation and strategy to help organizations deliver revenue growth that evolves with changing market conditions and business priorities.