Rebuilding: The Miner

You determined that you need to rebuild your marketing department, and are looking for an analytically oriented leader. You've taken the quiz, and you understand more about the five different Analytics Personalities.

Under what circumstances is a Miner a good investment?

You want to rebuild your marketing department around a Miner when you want to learn more about how your customer is behaving.

You don't hire a Miner until you had an Organizer build a customer data infrastructure for you ... the Organizer links customer data across all channels, and creates a reporting infrastructure that allows all Executives to be able to understand basic facts and findings about customers.

Once this infrastructure exists, you are ready to rebuild your marketing department around the skills of a Miner.

The Miner is motivated by "drilling down" into customer data to understand how customers are behaving. This type of individual is perfect when business is "changing". If you are dipping your toe into social media or mobile marketing, then this type of marketing leader will provide the data necessary to explain to the company how these emerging channels influence customer behavior.

You'll want a Miner if the rest of your Executive team is highly inquisitive. You'll want a Miner if the type of questions that your Executive team asks are "unique" ... in other words, if you want the same answers to the same questions, you hire an Organizer ... but if your questions evolve and change over time, seldom repeating, you want a Miner, because the Miner is motivated by an evolving and changing customer ecosystem.

If you can cope with uncertainty, hire a Miner. You hire an Organizer when you thrive in a world of certainty and consistency.

Once you hire a Miner, it is your job to motivate this person. Do not put this person in charge of KPIs and Dashboards and customer table development, because this person isn't motivated by these challenges. The Miner is motivated by answering new, unique, challenging questions.

Do not, however, expect the Miner to lead the company to a new strategy. The Miner is motivated by the act of mining data, not by leading the company down a new strategic path. You will be responsible for determining strategy if you hire a Miner. A CEO with strategic focus and a Marketing Executive with Miner tendencies can be a powerful combination.

If your customer data infrastructure is in place, but you don't know how customers are behaving, a Miner is a good choice for your rebuilding efforts.