Or, All the Best Ways To Cheat I Learned By Kindergarten

One of the hard early lessons for most kids is that life isn’t fair. Sometimes you are simply not going to win. For the lucky ones, those teaching moments are fairly harmless. That’s how it was for me. As a kid with no real problems, my examples are mostly trivial — like the fact that I shoot pool left-handed. That would be unremarkable if I actually were left-handed, but I am not. No, I’m just a guy who had two much older brothers who thought teaching me to play pool backwards was hilarious. And so, at least at that young age, the game seemed remarkably hard to win.

I have similar memories of playing “Monopoly.” On the rare occasion when I pestered my closest sibling (seven years older) into playing, I lost so badly that he liked to arrange his $500 bills in rows across the table. The bills are tan in color, so he was “sunning” them to enhance their hue. Years later, he would admit that he was just taking them from the bank whenever I wasn’t looking, because I was five and had the attention span of a gnat.

And of course, the old favorite, “keep-away.” As the two teenagers tossed a frisbee back and forth above my head, safely out of reach, I would run and jump pointlessly between them — until the day I grabbed a long stick and knocked it out of the air. We live and learn.

What Does This Have To Do With Data Investment?

When I work with clients who have been struggling with long-term data quality issues, those concerns most often coincide with an ongoing lack of investment in data management. The competition for scarce resources is tilted heavily toward financial metrics such as cost reductions or direct ROI. The rules of that particular game are too skewed for operations teams to fairly compete. There will always be an investment option, such as hiring additional sales reps, that can claim a more direct link to driving pipeline or revenue. A game based on those rules can keep investment away from data teams for years. They need a longer stick.

Change The Way The Game Is Scored

In order to prove that data investment should be a priority in your business, you need to adopt a deeper rulebook, expanding the definition of business value to paint a truer picture of both the problem and the potential in your current data strategy. Design a data scorecard that considers:

  • Financial benefits. Yes, direct and indirect financial impacts matter, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle.
  • Experiential benefits. How does improving data quality enhance the experience for customers, employees, and partners? How many of these benefits are already business priorities for at least some of your peers?
  • Operational benefits. Consider the ripple effect of better data across all areas of marketing and sales leading to improved performance, effectiveness, and efficiency. How many stakeholders would support your cause if you can deliver value for their teams?

It’s important that the metrics you choose are meaningful, provable, and closely tied to other current business priorities. If you do, you’ll often find allies in other parts of the business who see your investment as a way to address some of their own long-standing pain points.

I’ll be presenting on this topic at Forrester’s upcoming B2B Summit North America (Phoenix, Arizone, March 31–April 3, 2025) and meeting with attendees one on one to go deeper. Existing Forrester clients, read more now in the report, Making The Case For Investing In B2B Marketing And Sales Data, and reach out to your account teams to schedule a guidance session on the topic.