Three Data Analysis Projects to Inform Your Business Growth Strategies

As they grow, expansion stage companies invariably strive to optimize their marketing and sales strategies, with the goal of achieving sustained high revenue growth.

The issue for some companies, however, is ensuring that they’re focusing on the projects that will best inform those growth strategies. So, the challenge becomes identifying the projects that will most efficiently and effectively help them accomplish that goal, without draining the business’ time and resources.

Recently, we worked with VersionOne’s (an OpenView portfolio company) management team on some data analyses projects that helped the company accomplish that. I’ll highlight three of those projects below, all of which I think are extremely valuable. Best of all, they’re relatively easy to execute and don’t require a lot of resources.

While we offer these projects as part of our strategic consulting services, they’re completely straightforward for any startup to implement and execute them successfully on their own.

Here they are, with an explanation of the input, output, and method we used, and the insight we gleaned from them.

1. Identifying the best lead sources

The first project involves lead source and lead source combination analysis. Here’s how to perform it and what you can learn from it:

Input:

• Data export from web analytics and the CRM system.
• Note: It is crucial that the CRM system houses reliable records of the referring site and keywords where the lead originated.

Output:

• Ranking of lead sources by volume, conversion rate and revenue generated.
• Ranking of lead source combination (if the same prospect revisits the website multiple times and is converted multiple times via different sources) by volume, conversion rate and revenue generated.

Method:

• Correlate web analytics data with the CRM system to identify the most important lead sources and assign them to each lead.
• Use cross tab to analyze combinations of lead sources (lead paths) in terms of volume, conversion rate and revenue generated

Insight:

• Discovery of better lead sources in which to invest.
• Understanding of the best combination of lead sources to be used in conjunction together.

2. Scoring leads

The second project is a lead scoring analysis, which is covered in more detail in a case study here. Here’s a quick summary of the project we performed with VersionOne:

Input:

• Data export from CRM with all lead fields and conversion information (opportunity created, opportunity lost/won).

Output:

• A formula for calculating a ranking, ensuring that the leads that are most likely to convert are ranked on top.

Method:

• Perform cross tab analysis of lead conversion data versus lead information fields to identify the factors that affect potential conversion.
• Build up the ranking formula by adding the identified factors together — one by one — and comparing the predicted conversion with the actual data to gauge the ranking’s efficacy.
• Refine and validate the ranking formula with a fresh set of data.

Insight:

• What are the top 20% of leads that eventually convert to 80% of the opportunity?
• What are the lowest 20% of leads that will only contribute to 1% of the opportunity value created?

3. Lead conversion path analysis

This project performs an analysis of a web visitor’s typical path on a website, from the landing page to the exit or conversion page. This is more involved than the simple one-page conversion analysis, as it accounts for different visitor’s behaviors and analyzes the website more holistically.

Input:

• Web analytics data.

Output:

• Key conversion points: web forms, call to action and important product pages.
• Typical conversion paths, with volumes and conversion rates at each key conversion point.

Method:

• Segmenting traffic by the pages visited, analyzing the flow of traffic in and out of each page, calculating conversion rates at critical pages or forms, and calculating action rates at critical call to action items.

Insight:

• What are the most effective conversion points?
• What are the weakest conversion points and why?
• How should you optimize the website visitor flow to ensure optimal conversion?

Time to take action

Those are just a few of the projects we implemented with VersionOne. Among other things, these projects allowed the company to scale its sales and marketing operations in the most efficient way.

As I mentioned previously, these are relatively simple data analyses projects to perform. Even if you have a small staff and limited resources, the information they provide will certainly justify the time you invest in them.