1. In The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Service Providers, Q3 2021, Brandon Purcell writes, “Evalueserve carves a valuable niche in the B2B2X customer analytics space.” Would you agree this accurately describes Evalueserve’s differentiation?
Yes, we absolutely differentiate on our ability to contextualize customer analytics for B2B2X companies. In fact, our analytics practice was built on a heritage in supporting B2B and B2B2X decision-makers.
While the B2C customer analytics industry has historically been well-served, thanks to the wealth of resources available in this market (data, frameworks, methodologies, and approaches), our clients cannot default to many of these out-of-the-box solutions. Customer analytics in the B2B2X space demands a deep understanding of the domain, the industry, and niche business practices.
Evalueserve was ahead of the curve, working with many B2B2X clients on the research side of the business for over two decades. Our subject matter experts brought in a ton of experience, which helped us understand specific challenges common to the segment. This existing domain knowledge accelerated the development of sound frameworks and solutions catering to B2B and B2B2X needs.
Cross-pollination of use cases and ideas has always been our strong suit. We regularly leverage top B2C techniques and contextualize them to B2B and B2B2X settings. In doing so, we accelerate our clients’ journeys from data and insights to goal-oriented actions.
2. According to Forrester Wave, “[Evalueserve] demonstrates strengths in turning insights into optimal business actions and measuring the ROI of its work.” What makes you successful at delivering results to B2B and B2B2X companies?
Evalueserve was ranked highest in “Business Consulting Services” and outranked most in “Engagement Success Factors.” This is not a coincidence. To get B2B and B2B2X right, you need to understand client challenges and success factors to deliver results – more so than in B2C.
What makes us consistently successful is our decision-based solutioning. We always start with the question, “What is the business trying to accomplish, and how will analytics impact key business objectives?” From there, the entire process serves to deliver an output that will help decision-makers create business impact. In short, we build our analytics solutions to achieve ROI —real impact if you would— and that’s the overarching mission.
Like all things, with more time, more iterations, and more advancements, our processes have improved. Over the years, Evalueserve has developed and implemented proprietary decision-based frameworks such as Aligning Enterprise, Analytics, and Data Strategy (EAD), Complexity, ROI, Universality, Integrity of Data, Strategic Alignment, and Ease of Implementation (CRUISE), and Action Item Matrix (AIM), which have been integral to client success. We now have a rich repository of real use cases, methodologies, and approaches that work.
This growing set of best practices advances our methodology, shapes our accelerators, and trains AI. Behind all this is an incredible team. We have diverse skill sets, including subject matter experts serving as advisors, research analysts, data scientists, and technologists. Together, they deliver end-to-end customer analytics solutions.
3. What are some challenges in customer analytics unique to B2B and B2B2X?
We all know that Customer 360 is a challenge that the Googles, Amazons, and Microsofts of the world have solved to a great extent. They have a ton of data at the customer level, which helps B2C firms cater to the right audiences with the right messages and product offers.
Let’s flip the same business problem over to a Heavy Equipment Manufacturer (B2B2X): How do I, as a marketer, understand customer segments and preferences when I have buyers and purchasing managers (with no specific data pointing to their roles or preferences) as my target audience? It’s extremely difficult to zero in on specific buying journeys without being able to internalize buyer personas.
Now, let’s consider the Asset Management and Wealth Management industry (B2B). Asset Managers are tasked with accelerating clients, prospecting engagement across multiple activities, and passing qualified leads to sales. Without identity resolution and profiling of website visitors, it’s impossible to target the entity.
B2B and B2B2X marketing and sales teams face these fundamental challenges every day. Problems such as data availability, identity resolution, lack of standard data and analytics practices, and matrixed organizations have slowed analytics transformation. In many cases, there is also resistance to change from senior leadership.
We saw that the industry was underserved and lacked innovation. There was a clear business need, so we doubled down on helping clients implement solutions.
4. In addition to getting recognized by Forrester, Evalueserve was named one of the top three analytics providers by Analytics India Magazine. Congratulations! How did Evalueserve evolve from a research-focused company to a leader in analytics?
Evalueserve has always been the leader in providing external research and insights services to Fortune 500 clients across the globe. Between 2007 and 2013, we began augmenting research with analytics utilizing clients’ internal data, which we titled “Analytics 1.0” – our first foray into being a data-driven decision-making enabler.
Since 2014, leadership has focused on creating an independent analytics business. We strengthened our data science offerings in the realm of predictive and prescriptive analytics, which brought about “Analytics 2.0”.
As more companies grappled with inconsistent data and a lack of single source of truth to enable analytics, we introduced “Data Solutions.” This practice accelerated our growth towards the vision of being an end-to-end data and analytics service provider, also known as our “Analytics 3.0” phase.
Now we are in the “Analytics 4.0” phase brought on by our Analytics Applications, a suite of cloud-based data science platforms, customizable across multiple industries. These platforms accelerated the operationalization of key use cases and decreased the time to insights and ultimately actions. It’s been an exhilarating journey to watch the practice grow into an ideation-to-implementation partner for our clients.
5. What advice do you have for CMOs looking to revamp or enhance their customer analytics strategies?
Here are a few tips that can make a real difference to your ROI:
- Use a decision-centric framework – for example, the EAD framework makes your organization ready to leverage data and analytics to drive decisions.
- Make the right investments – a CDP platform is a must.
- Stitch data into an accurate customer story – weave together 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data to observe the whole buying journey.
- Experiment – do not be afraid of controlled experimentation to help you master different use cases.
About Swapnil Srivastava
Entrepreneurial and research-oriented Data Science leader with over 15 years of experience in analytics consulting, strategy development, corporate valuation, financial due diligence, and industry research. Proven expertise in helping clients leverage research and analytics to achieve strategic organizational objectives such as (i) revenue and margin improvement (ii) operations and asset utilization optimization (iii) establishing analytics centers of excellence, and (iv) accelerating digital transformation.
