Practitioners Guide External Data
Practitioners Guide External Data
some form or another for nearly as long as they’ve been running analytics
programs. But now many companies are amping up their external data
external data within analytics are business intelligence (69%) and data
science (56%).
our own data, we can only look internally.” Sure, internal data can shed
sales you’re doing, what kind of customers you have — but it’s effectively
just presenting information you already have at your disposal. Would you
When venturing into uncharted territory, external data is how you pave
4 | Practitioners Guide: External Data for Business Analysts
the way forward. When you are trying to penetrate into new markets, new
the organization gazes into the future. Through external data, analysts
can build predictive models that quickly substantiate the ROI of a given
venture, enrich existing business initiatives with greater context, and reveal
who the ideal customers are and when, where and what they are willing
to buy. In this guide, we explore the ways business analysts can deliver
strategic value through the kind of quantitative insight only external data
can bring.
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on the East Coast looking to expand to the West Coast. External data
can reveal rich insights about the target region, including the number
the area of each clinic such as median income, average age, number of
need to establish whether the customers they’re targeting with the new
that requires its own strategy. They will want to consider companies of a
specific size and type as well as the size of a specific department they’re
Business analysts can also use external data to predict their customers’
next moves. For example, they can train “lookalike” models to better
more likely to focus their marketing efforts on them as they align with what
they’re selling.
curation skills to the next level, try to approach data sourcing with an
investigative mindset.
Think about what you already know about your customer. Then think
about what you don’t know. What missing information do you need to
build a complete profile? If you can’t attain a data source that provides
the exact detail you’re looking for, how can you find that information
another way?
Perhaps you’re stuck trying to figure out why retail stores in one zip code
perform much better than stores in the neighborhood next door. You
key to doing that is to ask pertinent questions about the value of a data
source. Here are a few points to raise when buying external data from a
vendor.
When external data vendors amass large volumes of data from diverse
vendors where their data comes from. You can also ask them to provide
derived from other types of sources, such as social media, may need
additional vetting. You may not ever be able to assume a source is 100%
clean. Finding one that works pain-free from day one is extremely rare.
But what you can do is work with an external data vendor who takes
Data Recency
Data can go stale quickly. When it does, it becomes useless for
analytics. Invalid or inaccurate data can lead to misinformed
predictions and misguided decisions. Always ask before you buy: How
fresh is the data? How often is it updated?
Data Impact
Above all, does the data work for you? Business analysts can poke holes
in a dataset all day without ever concluding whether it will do what they
need. To assess data impact, examine the use case, expected outcomes,
and the cost of acquisition. While it can be difficult to show ROI until the
Privacy Compliance
Company and people datasets (see next chapter) may contain sensitive
prioritizes data security and privacy compliance, you need to make sure
your external data vendor does the same. Ask your vendor if they follow
prove it.
vulnerability scans
encryption at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher for encryption in transit and AWS
solve as well as signals you’ll discover that will have an impact when you didn’t
The external data business analysts need will vary by industry and market.
and finding data about them is notoriously hard. SMBs are often privately
held, very dynamic (e.g., whether they are open or closed or have moved to a
new address) and don’t generate much information. You will need to cast the
widest-possible net over different data sources from which to draw signals that
correlate with those of your current ideal potential customer. You’ll be surprised
Here are a few examples of external data categories that provide value for
Company Data
Company data refers to the broad swath of information about potential
Annual revenue
Number of sales
Payroll
Technology Information
Web presence
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People Data
People data can give analysts a fuller picture of the lifestyles of their
experiences.
of tweets
awareness
Geospatial Data
Geospatial data spans geographical and location-specific information,
economic status.
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Retail turnover
Retail centrality
16 | Practitioners Guide: External Data for Business Analysts
matching, and integrating external data. The good news is, these
use cases. Tasked with managing all the data coming from multiple
administrative burden.
To start, businesses need to identify the best vendors for the data they’re
looking for. Then they have to usher the data contracts through multiple
several months at the enterprise level. Finally, there’s a chance that by the
time they get the sign-off they need, the dataset in question may already
have gone stale. And that’s just considering internal approval. There’s also
miss the window at a big company where budgets get set once a year,
per-vendor basis. Buying one source of data is hard enough. Now imagine
analysts have the dataset in hand, they now must prep, match, enrich,
and integrate it with internal data. This is where business analysts report
When the same records appear in multiple instances across data sources,
just need to line up rows or columns from one dataset with another, and
everything falls into place. But often there’s a conflict, and analysts need
Doing this data cleansing work upfront helps assure that data is clear,
complete, and accurate. But it’s no guarantee that the data will stay
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that way. Data vendors may start using a less reliable source. Quality
correction.
Even when business analysts successfully identify and purchase the exact
and several different vendors, business analysts need only work with one.
needs to be done once. Not only have Explorium’s data sources been
curated for quality and reliability, they form a single, collective catalog, so
essentially treat them as a single resource, lifting out only the features
them into brand new datasets. Working with ready-to-use data enables
relevant, impactful data signals and uses them to generate insights that
go beyond your data, like Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or disruptive GTM
data. With faster, better insights from their models, marketing and sales
risks.
1. Market Segmentation
already have with multiple external data sources. Upload your internal
data, and the platform delivers additional insights, such as your potential
22 | Practitioners Guide: External Data for Business Analysts
profile. The more sources you add to your dataset, the more the system
needs.
data to build models that help marketing teams predict their customers’
next moves. They can easily access the most impactful enrichments,
source them into Salesforce and quickly pinpoint the most valuable leads.
industry are usually the three things taken into account for traditional lead
company.
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legal reviews of vendor contracts to make sure liabilities are in place if the
integration.