3 Align analytics with business strategy

Knowing how a business works is not enough. You also need to know where management is trying to take it.

Without that context, analytics teams default to optimising the present. They measure what is already being measured, improve processes that are already running, and build things that are technically solid but strategically irrelevant. The work might be good. It just does not matter to the people who decide whether analytics gets funded.

If leadership has a strategy document, ask for it and read it. Most of the time, one either does not exist or is too vague to be useful. In those cases, four questions will get you most of the way there:

Where do you want the business to be in 10 years?
What is the journey from where we are today to that goal?
What are the biggest barriers on that journey?
What are we actively doing to make progress?

Ask the most senior person you can. Then check your understanding with one or two other leaders. If the answers are consistent, you have a clear picture. If they differ, that inconsistency is itself useful information.

Your goal is to identify which parts of the Business Model Canvas and which stages of the process map matter most to management right now. Once you know that, you know where analytics will have the most impact.

Example — B2B SaaS

Where do you want the business to be in 10 years? $500 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $40 million today, with a strong presence in the US market.

What is the journey to get there? Move upmarket from SMB into mid-market and enterprise, where contracts are larger and churn is lower. Expand from Australia into the US, starting with a small team focused on outbound sales.

What are the biggest barriers? The product was built for small teams and does not yet meet the needs of larger organisations. The sales team does not have experience running longer enterprise deals. And we have not yet figured out what go-to-market motion works in the US.

What are we doing today to make progress? We have hired a Head of Enterprise to lead the upmarket push. We are running pilots with five mid-market accounts to understand the product gaps. And we have two people on the ground in San Francisco testing different acquisition approaches.

Example — Non-bank lender

Where do you want the business to be in 10 years? Grow the loan book from $2 billion to $10 billion while keeping bad debts at or below current levels.

What is the journey to get there? Start lending to a broader range of borrowers where margins are higher. Win more customers directly rather than through brokers. And lower the cost of the money we borrow to fund new loans.

What are the biggest barriers? We do not have enough historical data to lend confidently to riskier borrowers. Our top 20 brokers account for 60% of volume, which makes us vulnerable. And slow document collection is creating delays between application and settlement that hurt conversion.

What are we doing today to make progress? We have launched a pilot for riskier borrowers with tighter lending limits while we build up data. We are investing in direct marketing and building a self-service application channel. And we have a project underway to digitise document collection and automate the chasing process.