The Hillstrom System

For whatever the reason, this topic has come up many times in the past month.

• "We want to implement your system, the 'Hillstrom System' of analyzing customer performance and then integrate your work with our marketing efforts. Unfortunately, my Marketing Executive and our Analytics Director disagree with your system, so we never make progress. How can I get my team to embrace your system?"

Every Marketing Executive has her own Marketing System, her way for growing a business. You're not going to cause this person to change. It would be like asking Bill Walsh to embrace something other than the West Coast offense - he invented it, why would he go in a different direction? He wouldn't do that.

Analytics professionals dig their heels in much harder. Whereas the Marketing Executive almost always has "a system" unique to her history and skills, the Analytics professional generally cannot define what her system is ... she's never had to think about it ... she simply knows that other people are doing things the wrong way or in a sub-optimal way and has become very good at pointing out that fact. Some analysts possess empathy ... a combination of empathy and smarts is what you are looking for. But by and large, it's hard to find an Analytics professional who has a clear and generally easy to understand "system" to grow your business.

This is where Executives ask me for advice ... "is there an agency who thinks like you think, one we could work with to bypass our internal marketing/analytics challenges?"

There's one that seems to liberally copy many of my concepts ... they either copy them and understand them and bring the concepts of the system into the modern world, or they fully invented something on their own that so completely aligns with my worldview that there is a serendipitous outcome.

Take a look at this (click here) ... it's as close to my worldview as anybody has come to embracing it. Tell me what you think (kevinh@minethatdata.com).

P.S.:  Often, the Executive who wants to implement the "Hillstrom System" is actually looking to implement dashboards. In upcoming posts, I'll tell you more about the "Hillstrom System", but the marketer is often looking for dashboard reporting that the analyst won't provide, and the analyst upon seeing dashboards refuses to program them. Happens all the time. It's why I stay away from "dashboard reporting requests" and "can you help us execute campaigns" requests. Both are symptoms of marketer/analyst disfunction.