How to become a frontrunner! - Aleks and Nathalie as Customer Intelligence Analysts

Aiming for growth and being ambitious are just two of many things that constitute our way of working together. It inspires us to aim for a higher goal and motivates us to pursue personal and professional development. Aiming for growth can mean something different for the Alascians in our Revenue Operations Team. This team searches for areas where we have the potential for process improvement that helps us grow as a company to become the category leader in real estate. Aleks and Nathalie, who are frontrunners in our Revenue Operations Team, decided to improve their professional skills in data analysis through an online course. Their goal was to make sure that they draw the correct conclusions from the data they face every day to lead the team's actions in the right direction.?

Today Nathalie and Aleks tell us their development story and give us insights into the personal challenges and successes they faced in the meantime.

Alasco: "Aleks, Nathalie, as Customer Intelligence Analysts in our Revenue Operations Team you are responsible for the lead generation and its performance. To improve your skills you both decided to participate in a Data Analytics course last year. How come?"

Aleks: "As part of the Revenue Operations Team Nathalie and I realized that we wanted to get to know more analytic techniques. Johannes, one of our colleagues, inspired us because he took part in a similar course. With his recommendation, we searched for a course that suited us: Our goal was a better understanding of all the possibilities we have as Customer Intelligence Analysts when it comes to data analytics."

Alasco: "This makes sense! And was there any topic that the course tackled in particular?"

Nathalie: "The ultimate objective was to get an overview of a variety of data analytics techniques while keeping the business value they add in mind. Besides navigating spreadsheets in a more advanced way, we used the newest business intelligence and machine learning tools to draw clear insights and make rational predictions based on this data. Personally, the question of how to communicate those key messages internally was of enormous interest for us."

Alasco: "This sounds challenging on the one hand but also extremely interesting and enlightening. You said that you wanted to get into those tools to understand them more deeply. How exactly did the course go and did it offer you the value you were looking for?"

Aleks: "We appreciated the group size - we were only six attendees and two extremely motivated coaches overall, which made it kind of feel like informal private schooling. During those 12 weeks, we had an interactive online course that took three hours every second week. There we were taught the most important tools and had to participate actively to understand them. The other two weeks per month were offered as private coaching lessons. There we could focus on our problems and ask for individual advice. Those coaching sessions were extremely beneficial since we were given an individual task at the beginning, where we had to think of appropriate business questions we wanted to answer. We had to present our solution at the end of the course with several visualizations and analyses."

Alasco: "Where could you develop yourself the most, and which challenges did you face, especially in combination with your full-time job here?"

Nathalie: "This combination was exactly what we were looking for. We had to use and internalize the input immediately, which quickly improved our understanding. Now we know exactly what we gained from the individual tools and the overall course as well. Especially the new way of storytelling and the visualization skills brought us forward. It sharpened our eye for understanding important connections and new solutions that we can apply at Alasco. As beneficial as the course was, we cannot deny that the individual project especially cost a lot of time. But the good thing was that we used our three development days to focus fully on the project. Our development budget and those personal development days made this course possible in the first place."

Alasco: "As challenging and time-consuming this sounds, it sounds instructive as well! Aleks, Nathalie, if you had to summarize your experience with Alasco’s development budget in about one sentence – what would you say?"

Aleks: “I think that the development budget at Alasco is a great opportunity to develop your skills in different areas to improve your business excellence in daily doing and grow personally. This time, the Data Analytics course from Growth Tribe helped me a lot in practicing different data analytics techniques to gather the best insights out of our data in the future.”

Alasco:?"Thank you, Aleks and Nathalie – we are extremely proud to count you to our team and appreciate that you drive your personal and professional development forward."