Increasing the influence of Insights: in conversation with Debra Walmsley

Following our client event focused on elevating the role of insights within businesses, Jo Farquhar , Director at Incite, spoke to Debra Walmsley to get her perspective.

Debra has held Head of Insight roles at British Airways, Centrica, Halfords and Saga, whilst more recently supporting the Virgin Atlantic team on a number of strategic projects. She also works with the Insight Management Academy to promote the transformation of insight within organisations.?

Jo: In the discussions at the event about elevating the role of insights, three themes emerged: being influential, being proactive and being curious.? Before we jump into talking about influence, do they ring true to you??

Debra:? Yes – very much so. There are lots of parallels between them and what we talk about at the IMA around transforming the way that insights are used within organisations.?

When it comes to elevating the role of insights, I feel there are two sides to the coin: one – which can get more air time – is quite factual, about being evidence-based in decision-making. The other is more about building a feel for the customer in your business: driving customer centricity, building customer instinct within an organisation. That’s more nuanced. But both of them are critical.?

Jo: That links nicely to Influence – the main area we're going to discuss. What does influence mean to you, and how can an insights team go about building it??

Debra: For me, influence is seeing that insight is being used to guide decisions in the day to day running of the business.

Every organisation has a different start point, and you've got lots of factions that are closer to or further from the customer.?It’s important to build influence, not just with your marketing team, but beyond it as well.

Often the Insights function sits within marketing and has a close relationship there. But you get ‘marketing speak’, and it's easy to get pulled into that as an insight team. That’s very different to the operational, commercial and finance parts of the business. They can seem to talk completely different languages, and part of influence is learning the language they speak.? You need to know how those teams work, how you can develop a connection to the customer for them, and ultimately how they can be influenced. ?

One of the more rational ways I’ve done that is by taking a key metric like NPS, and working with the finance team to derive the value of it. If they’ve worked on that number, they believe in it. When you have subsequent conversations about investments that will improve customer experience, you can talk about ROI in a very meaningful way.? We did this at Saga, and when you go back into the boardroom and thank the CFO for their team’s help with this… you get someone nodding in the room that's not just the CMO. You’ve got another ally, and then when business cases for improvements in CX come up, you’re more likely to get their support.?

Jo: You mentioned the word factions and also allies. How do you identify where to build those relationships and to focus your influencing??

Debra:. It really varies within organisations as to where the centres of influence actually are. One of the things that I often do with my teams is to do a stakeholder mapping: I call this the web of influence.?

You have the Board in the middle, lines that come out of that and the web that connects them. You need to understand where the key relationships are within the web.? Once you understand the web, you can prioritise and cluster groups of people that you're going to work with.?

?

Jo: Your description of stakeholder mapping is fascinating, it links nicely with the empathy mapping my colleague Emma discussed recently . How do you go about building influence with these people??

Debra:? A key thing is understanding what their big challenges are. As part of the planning cycle I’d run a session with the Insights team focused on this.

We'd discuss: what are the big challenges facing the business? How do those challenges align to the business ambition? What are the questions that insight needs to answer? ?

Once you've identified those, you align it with your stakeholder map, and consider who those challenges are pertinent to. That starts to prioritise the stakeholders you want to align to, and you can start to build your plan.??

?

Jo: So is there a role that specific projects play??

Debra: Absolutely. Building influence is also about having some standout projects, that really made a difference, that answered a key challenge that the businesses had. Those are the landmark pieces that the Insights team become famous for.?

For instance, when I was at Halfords, the work that you guys did on the segmentation was a massively defining piece for me. It meant that the whole business could start with the customer in terms of the development of the propositions, the communications, operational activity – everything was grounded in that fantastic understanding of who our customers were.?

Those are the influential projects that you can point to that and say, yes, we helped the business to get closer to the customer. And we could also be more targeted about what we did – so it also drove commercial impact.? ?

Jo: And how can agencies help to increase that influence, what role can they play??

Debra: I think it's about communication with impact.? That partly comes down to how close they are to the business and able to do that effectively.??

From a project perspective, It starts at the design stage – designing it to get the right outcomes and then working collaboratively on the output. STRAT7 do this really well.??

?

Jo: That makes sense. So from design to delivery, it’s having the right tools and level of collaboration to ensure that the project and its outcomes really hit the spot.?

And overall, it’s about building and strengthening those Trusted Advisor relationships that we talk about at Incite. Becoming more of a strategic partner to both you and your stakeholders, to help you to have a positive influence on those key business decisions, and ultimately elevate the role of the Insights team.??