Some of us are lucky enough to work in a place with analysts who can help us make sense of our data. But there are added challenges in making this collaboration work.
Analysts may struggle with the questions marketers ask, finding them too vague for analyzing.
Marketers may get data back that they find irrrelevant; they may assume the analyst misunderstood their request. I’ll grant that we can speak the same language, but that isn’t enough. An Analyst cannot look at all the data, they cannot do analysis that will answer all your questions. The outcome you get will match the old movie Cool Hand Luke, which put it this way, WHAT WE’VE GOT HERE IS A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE.
The solution is for both sides to learn just enough of how the other’s world to have meaningful dialogues all the way from problem scoping to decision-making.
My guest today has been on the analyst’s side of that table. He knows what practices determine whether this partnership works or fails. Graduating with a B.Sc. in Statistics, he has served as a Business Intelligence (BI) professional at various Government agencies and school boards. He is at home using tools like GA4, IBM Cognos to Microsoft PowerBI and writing in languages like SQL, DAX and Python.
He’s also previously been a professional jazz musician, which led 17 years ago to him founding JazzGuitarLessons.net, a site selling online guitar courses to budding musicians. running the ecommerce and email aspects of that site using his knowledge of analytics proves how well he knows what information we need on the marketing side of the business.
Let’s go to Gatineau Quebec to learn what analysts need from marketers to do their best work, with Marc-Andre Seguin.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Intro
03:07 Meet Marc-Andre
05:58 Bias And Ground Rules
07:10 Data Quality And Signal
08:51 Cost Of Analytics Stack
11:35 What Makes Analysts Great
13:35 SME Habits That Help
17:29 Communication And Personalities
19:32 Chatbot Announcement
19:59 Stats And Tools For Marketers
23:53 Using LLMs With Guardrails
26:20 Wrap Up And Where To Find
People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show
Marc-Andre’s .jazz guitar site