Three handshakes of data

While traveling for business a few months ago, I had just finished a day with a client and decided to sit down for a beer at the hotel bar. Two gents were talking a few seats away and I joined in on the conversation. Ten minutes later we were exchanging cards. “You are always three handshakes away from everything you need to be successful,” one of them said. I found that comment to be very impactful. Since that meeting I interact with him often, and while we have not done any business yet I’m confident that we will because he is a valued connection. We were social.

In the age of “social selling” with stars like Koka Sexton and Jill Rowley who are adamantly and quite successfully selling the idea of “always be connecting,” and “always be giving back,” I could not agree more. Being able to teach someone something new is very valuable. A different client in financial services once told my firm that as long as we are teaching them things about their business they will be a client.

We tend to forget that in the social age of Facebook friends, Twitter Followers, and Linkedin connections, the ultimate goal is to connect and add value to be successful. It’s human. Once we are connected, we can derive the value of that connection. I tend to take that correlation back to day-to-day work in the data and research space looking for insights and intelligence.

The other factor to consider is being able to set the stage so that the connection can grow into a relationship. When I talk to great sales people like Erica Delsignore, founder of www.SalesBoston.com (you should check out her website, she’s awesome), the success of her engagements and the ROI back to her clients is based on the quality of the information she is given to act on and make a connection. Better data leads to better results and that leads to better ROI. The data must be smart and actionable.

To be successful in creating what we like to call "smart data" you need four things:

1. Good sources of information
2. Good technology to house and help collect the information
3. Great people to manage the process
4. Great process to maintain and improve quality

How do we do this? This is achieved by pairing technology with well-trained, experienced research analysts and quality assurance professionals, with a set of principles-based transformation rules, and a rigorous, disciplined analysis and QA/QC testing process, all enabled by a technology-based infrastructure...While this means that technology needs to govern your workflow (routing, queuing, testing, outlier identification), the intelligence needed to assess individual data values (because all datasets are different!) has to applied by experienced research professionals. With deeper data transformation training than data entry people and new layers of machine-based and human-driven quality assurance testing,

Imagine if you could skip two of the handshakes to get to the hand you really wanted in half the time or just in time each time.

Feel free to reach out and shake my hand.