EP88: Get Thee to a Data Concierge.

This week, our Market Dominance Guy, Chris Beall, is again flying solo as he continues his conversation with business intelligence engineer Tom Zheng, an expert in the field of data analysis. Explaining the importance of a data-related topic to this podcast audience, Chris points out, “Everybody who is used to Market Dominance Guys knows we talk sales, sales, sales. But because sales generate a lot of numbers, you need a data concierge to take that information and help you generate potential insights.” As a CEO, Chris is currently using a data concierge to analyze all the numbers his company generates and to make sense of the results. What works best, he says, is to tackle this process one-on-one — the CEO and data concierge only — in order to eliminate company politics.

This depth of analysis requires skills and tools beyond the use of an Excel spreadsheet. So, on our listeners’ behalf, Chris asks Tom what you should look for when hiring someone to guide you through your data analysis. And then, from his own successful experience working with Tom, Chris adds this advice: “Your data concierge needs to be someone with clear communication skills to explain things to you in terms you can understand.” Obviously, comprehensive data analysis is not a do-it-yourself project for a Chief Executive Officer: There are just not enough hours in a CEO’s day. Thus, the strong recommendation, as the title of this week’s Market Dominance Guys commands, “Get Thee to a Data Concierge!”

Listen to Part 1:

Giving Your Data the Sniff Test

About Our Guest

Tom Zheng, a business intelligence engineer, and independent contractor is a seasoned data guru who specializes in transforming your company’s data into actionable insights. With experience throughout the entire data value chain, from designing robust data ecosystems, implementing automated pipelines, and visualizing results in meaningful ways, Tom’s unique storytelling approach will help you discover those “Aha!” moments needed to challenge traditional thinking and assumptions. He can be reached at (416) 877-5412.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Tom Zheng:

Yeah, I mean, communication is definitely something that one has to develop over time, right. But one of the things that I've quickly learned is that people, generally speaking, don't like to be told what to do or what they need to do. So instead, what I tend to do is I give them the opportunity for them to come to the same conclusion that I wanted them to do in the first place. Right? So for example, you know, like, let's say if I wanted my girlfriend to clean the kitchen, right. Instead of saying "Hey, please clean the kitchen." And by the way, I usually clean the kitchen so I can use this analogy. I'll say, "Hey, doesn't this kitchen look a little bit dirty to you?" You know? And then you try to get the other person to come to the same conclusion. And then they realize, oh, you know what, you're right. I got to do this. Right. Or, oh, I got to change my assumption.

Tom Zheng:

So that works out to be a better play usually then directly saying to somebody no, this assumption is flat out wrong. Even if you genuinely believe that you can usually use better language to help the other person drive to this.

Chris Beall:

And that gives them a little bit of time to, you know we say this about cold calling that when you get cold-called your problem is that you've been cold called. And so you're trying to solve that problem by getting off the call, but you have to keep your self-image intact. And the great cold caller takes advantage of that and says, okay, I know that you want to get off this call. They know going in. You want to get off this call with your self-image intact. I will offer you a way to do that. That if you take that way, I'll get something also, which is the opportunity to say something to you. And so, we teach that, right? I know I'm an interruption in 27 seconds, tell you why I called.

Chris Beall:

And the purpose of that is, one, to get somebody to trust you, which is also very important if you're going to be a data concierge, you have to be trusted. And two, to give them some time to change their mind about their goal. Their goal is to get off the call with their self-image intact, but maybe their goal could be to be sufficiently curious. It could be changed to be sufficiently curious, to accept a calendar invitation for a meeting.

Chris Beall:

So it seems like as a data concierge, you're in a funny situation because you can see often what is needed, but just straight up prescribing it so to speak is not going to get the patient to take the medicine. You have to figure out some way without wasting time to let enough time go by with enough, the right kind of input that somebody can shift their mind. And I would imagine the hardest mind shift is away from assumptions that have been baked into the business for a long time. The way we've always done things, right. I come up with those all the time in my own business and I go, really for 13 years, we didn't train anybody how to speak up because our assumption was we're not that kind of company and as soon as we start doing it, great things happen, right?

Tom Zheng:

Right. I can definitely vouch for any sort of, for example, sales training program such as ConnectAndSell's Flight School because I myself have received something similar to that in the past, which is training how to sell credit cards. Because when I was in university for one summer, I had to sell credit cards for my summer job. And believe me, Chris, that was the hardest job I've ever had. But through continuous training and through learning from your mistakes, you, just a simple change in your wording to make a huge difference, right? I mean, one of the key lessons in credit card selling is never mention the word credit. Don't mention credit, unless they ask you for it, just say, "Hey, would you be interested in this card?" And if they ask you, "Oh, well, what kind of card is it?" Then you have to tell the truth, but often people won't.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. So I'm recommending to anybody watching this or listening to Market Dominance Guys, Hey, somehow get yourself a data concierge. And I'm going to make a strong recommendation. Do your interacting with your data concierge one-on-one and don't do it with any politics in the room. So be alone, be part of that lonely minds club of your own, but know that you've got somebody who can discern truths and let you explore truths in the data and who will be both rigorous about how the work is done, but will allow you to kind of come along, right? It's not going to demand that you make an instantaneous flip of every moment. So that's, my recommendation is get one of these. And there's a hard recommendation. I mean, now that I'm doing this, I regret not having had this experience for the past 10 years.

Chris Beall:

Actually, when I started with ConnectAndSell, if all I had done, if all I had done was said "You know, Sean," to Sean McLaren, "I actually don't think in my role as the senior vice president of products or chief product officer or whatever the heck I was called, I don't think I should launch right into the product. I think I need to have somebody work with me and go through the data that the company's generating and the data that's in the CRM and try to make sense out of it. Had I done that I probably would have lopped seven years off off of this journey. I think I would have. About seven out of the 10 and we'd be about seven years ahead. And given that time is nobody's friend in business, time is never your friend. I highly recommend this as an accelerant to your business as a whole.

Chris Beall:

And frankly, as a CEO, you need some power too. Right, you need to have the power of known truths rather than guesses otherwise your own people are going to go "Yeah but that's not the way we did it yesterday." You get a lot of "Yeah , but" back to you when you're a CEO. That's kind of like everybody's in the "Yeah, but" department. And all they're really saying is "yeah, but that's not the way we did it yesterday." So folks, are going to take me up on this, brilliant idea that I have. Go get yourself a data concierge. Where should they look? I got lucky. Our VP of customer success and master of intensive test drives, James Townsend kindly introduced me to you. And we didn't know exactly what we were going to do. And then we kind of I'll call it, shaped it up as we went along, but it shaped up pretty quickly. Now I think I know the shape, but if somebody is looking for you, but not you, what should they be looking for? And also what should they be avoiding like the plague?

Tom Zheng:

You want to be able to trim the fat as much as you can and avoid middleman, right? The simplest way for anyone to go about this is obviously to be able to go to a consulting firm, contact their partners, say this is what I need. And then you end up with a multi, not a multimillion, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a consultant contract. And that's not realistically what you want because you have too many people that are in the middle who are interfering with things, right? Ultimately you want flexibility and direct action. So what I would do if I was in the market, looking for someone who could fulfill that data concierge role is somebody who has experience in the entire spectrum of data, which is basically to say data analysis and data engineering, primarily. Data architecture is less needed in my opinion, but for sure you want somebody who has done both data analysis, which is somebody to analyze clean data and data engineering, which is someone to clean up dirty data and to clean data for the analysts to use, right.

Tom Zheng:

But the key thing though, is they should have enough business background to have strong business acumen because you'll often find people who are very technical, very number savvy, but they don't understand the bigger picture. So where I would start is looking at people who might've gone to business school, let's say, but ended up focusing on something with a data niche. Right? And so that's, I think the sweet spot in terms of intersection of the type of skillsets that an ideal candidate would want. Now, to be honest, where could you go for this? That I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm not sure there's exactly a dedicated firm out there who provides data concierge service. Hey, unless maybe I start that firm who knows, right? But simply if you were to, for example, post a job on LinkedIn or on Indeed or something, the skill sets that you would want is generally speaking, the technical experience coming from either a data analyst or a data engineering role, plus, strong business acumen skills.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. I think I'd add one to it. And this is one of those rare cases where an interview can get you a lot more than you would expect, which is you need somebody who can explain something to you in terms you can understand without generalizing to stuff that doesn't make any difference. And that's, I don't know how you find that, but I know how I know that would be a huge mistake is finding somebody who's got all these other skills, but the skill that a data concierge would have is the ability to work interactively. And that means clear communication and keeping their wits about them. And knowing also, this is an interesting skill. You do this extraordinarily well, knowing when to say, okay, in order to go down that path of that exploration, it's going to take me a little bit of time because, and you're always very careful about this, because I need to do X, Y, and Z in order to prepare for that.

Chris Beall:

And therefore I can share those results with you tomorrow. That ability to clip the conversation and say, got it. I know, Mr CEO, Ms. CEO, you're driving in this direction, but let's face it, the road we're on is getting more and more slick with black ice. And unless I have a chance to go out and put some salt and pea gravel down, we're going to go off a cliff. So let's not just keep doing this. Let's just stop here and I'll go prepare the road for you, for us. And then we get to drive down that road. That seems pretty important.

Tom Zheng:

It is important. Unfortunately, the only way to be able to obtain that skill is from experience right. Of working with data. Because typically what I do is before I start each meeting, right? Each service, let's say. I would prepare and massage data like a funnel. You know, a funnel only goes so wide or it goes so deep. So once you exceed the width of the funnel or the depth or the length of the funnel, however you want to call it, that's when the concierge would need more time because I can only predict to a certain degree of the types of things that will want to analyze because X, Y, and Z. And so every good data concierge should prepare some preliminary stats and preliminary data to begin with, but there will always be the time where you're going to go out of your funnel, right. Which means more time is needed. And unfortunately, to develop that skillset of knowing what type of data you should have in your funnel, as well as when you're about to exceed your funnel, that unfortunately can only come with experience.

Chris Beall:

Yeah. It's well let's say an exacting business. That's so valuable. I actually think this would be game-changing for everybody who's trying to run a company and succeed in the market. And I don't think anybody knows that it's out there as a way of doing things. It's one of these situations that my recommendation to folks would be find somebody that's better than you are with data. Now, most CEOs aren't bad with it, right. But somebody who's better than you are, has the ability to work with tools that go beyond Excel. I think the ability to visualize quickly to get a visualization right in front of your eyes, in order to validate or partially validate or invalidate a hypothesis is critical. The number of times you've just put something up on a scatter chart or some marching bar graph or whatever, we just look at it and go, huh, that's it like, huh?

Chris Beall:

I didn't expect that. Right. Getting that cycle time down, I think requires facility with tools like Power BI that we're using that kind of allow you to iterate on visualization, to go from thinking, to looking, to talking, to thinking, to looking to talking in some cycle and kind of get going with it. Because here's my guess, my guess is most CEOs bring to bear sufficient curiosity and ability to communicate with somebody that they're kind of directing that they could work with to some degree, anybody who's better than they are with data, better with the tools and that they've given access to all the data, which by the way, it's not the thing we haven't talked about. You have to have kind of all of it. You can't have just some of it. And who is kind of capable of hanging in the room with just the two of you on a zoom and that you can form a bond with, as you go along doing this, because they're going to be inside jokes so to speak about the data, right.

Chris Beall:

They just show up and it's like, that's one of those kinds of jokes, right. We run into them all the time. So it seems quite doable. And I would encourage folks to, in my position to jump a little sooner and see what you can do. Maybe just somebody on your staff who loves a good spreadsheet, perhaps send them off to Power BI class or something like that. And they know your business and then maybe switch their job over. By the way anybody is thinking of doing this, data concierge is truly a full-time engagement. It takes a day of work to get to an hour of interaction. Is that a reasonable cycle?

Tom Zheng:

I would say so. Yes. It's. I mean, another analogy that I think is quite good is it takes 80% of cooking time to actually just prep the ingredients, right. To wash your vegetables, chop it up and stuff. The actual final bit of stir fry or assembly. That actually is pretty quick, right? I mean, let's say you're doing a stir fry or whatever, right. Once you have everything done and you put everything into your pan and you stir fry, that's quick. And that's why I hate watching those Gordon Ramsey videos, right. Where it's like, oh, this delicious meal in 10 minutes. Well, it's like, dude, you already have all the ingredients prepped. Right. So yes, I would say that's used to be about right, where it takes for me, at least it takes about a full day of prep work in order to get one to two hours of analysis.

Chris Beall:

Yeah, that makes sense. And then you iterate again, you find something new to go after. Sometimes you just find a blocker. It's like we had the last few days involve the fact that ConnectAndSell has got a little bit of data, right. Compared to some folks. I mean, you've been dealing with millions of rows and now we're talking about a hundred million rows or thereabouts. And a hundred million rows of data is kind of challenging for some of the tools. And you have to figure out, I'll call it data engineering of the other kind. It's data infrastructure engineering, just making it work, which of these techniques will physically get this data together. But one thing you've emphasized is when you're doing that kind of work, go get it done. It might cause a delay, but go get it done and resist the temptation to just summarize.

Chris Beall:

Because once you've summarized, you've lost the information that, you're making an assumption, right? There's the sum in summarize, may be the sum in assumption, but there's something that you believe and that thing can turn out to be false. And then you don't have access to the detail anymore. So it seems like that's an important thing too, is before you CEOs that want to work with a data concierge, make sure that when you run into a problem that could be solved with either an insight about how some tool works or with money, by the way, suddenly the tools seem cheap, right? Because you, as a CEO, your time is very valuable and you get that. One thing you don't have to sell any CEO on is that their own time is very valuable. That's an easy one. So when you think about that though, it's like, huh, okay.

Chris Beall:

So I've got to bring a certain patience to bear along with drive and curiosity. Because I've got my job to do as the CEO in the data concierge relationship. And I've got to keep my end up. And part of it is like drive, willingness to clip off areas of inquiry because I know they have no business value. I suddenly realized the insight is that doesn't mean anything, right. Let's not go there. But the other insight coming from the data concierge side is, I got to go figure this thing out with regard to putting a hundred pounds of mud in a 10-pound sack or whatever it is. And I'll keep you posted. Right. I mean, all that stuff's got to happen, it's kind of a complex relationship, a bit of a marriage actually.

Tom Zheng:

Yeah. I would say so for sure. One thing I was going to say for any CEO's or companies who want to get started, but might be limited in their resources, either staffing or budget. The great thing about tools like Power BI is that there are lots of training videos out there for free that teach you how to use the tool, right? And so, as long as you have an analytical mindset and you have strong business acumen and maybe an ability to communicate things clearly, if it's really just the lack of knowledge of the tool that's your constraint, then I highly recommend going on YouTube or LinkedIn Learning and watching some of those videos and doing some of those tutorials because nobody is born with these skills.

Tom Zheng:

Everybody at some point would have had to do those training as well, including myself. And even though it does take a little bit of time, I would say, if you are wanting to pursue this path, give for example, one of your staff members one whole week, and just basically say, let me reduce your workload and just focus on completing this training module. And I guarantee you will find your return on investment of not one week of possibly lost productivity on that employee.

Chris Beall:

I think that's a great recommendation. And I would recommend this is something that came up in a conversation with some very senior people at Microsoft about, Hey, you know, Microsoft has Power BI, most powerful use of Power BI is directly with the CEO. Does anybody let that happen? And one of the people said, "Well, yeah, the tools are so easy a CEO could learn to use them." I guarantee you as a CEO, you're not going to do any better learning to use the tools yourself because your day won't allow you the focus time to make use of them, you'll think that you're doing something but quite frankly, what you're doing is what I call a science project. And your science project will not win the science fair. You need to do what Tom just said, which is, I would say, take somebody in your organization who has that weird facility with Excel, but they're really a business person and say, Hey, let's skill you up on the super version of Excel.

Chris Beall:

The one that can handle more than a million rows, the one that can do visualizations 20 ways from Sunday at a click. The one that you can preserve your work and reapply it to other situations or other chunks of data. And so Power BI is a great example. There are others that are out there for sure, but you know take that person and do what Tom suggests, which is make it their job to learn the tool that is really, I'll call it Excel to the next level because companies tend to run on Excel. That means somebody out there knows it. Somebody might know the business and then, they could come from any department. And then try that person out as your data concierge. Schedule an hour, a week or an hour a day with them. And I do think it takes about an hour a day.

Chris Beall:

You could do it for half an hour, but at the beginning, I think it's an hour a day. That's your time commitment as a CEO. Make sure they get all the data that it somehow be brought together enough that it lets you explore something together and get in the canoe together. It's kind of like a canoe, right? You've got the data concierge in the front of the canoe, providing all the power and you're in the back and you're providing a little power and some steering, but mostly what you're doing is you're stopping and saying, huh, you know your river running here. What do you think? Do we go down the right side or the left side or the middle? Or are we just cool and we just keep going. We don't have to get out or do we have to portage? Or what do we have to do right?

Chris Beall:

And that's, you're very much together in a boat. I think it's a two-person operation. It is like a canoe. A canoe is [inaudible 00:24:11] a little bit specialized, but it's not one hundred percent specialized. Everybody paddles in that there are two of you who paddle. If things go well, you stay dry and you try not to get dumped. And you do have to stop every once in a while to figure out what your next move is. And then when it's time to go, you got to get in and kind of pedal like that.

Tom Zheng:

Exactly. Exactly. Just going back to your point about Excel. I mean, the tool that we've been using, which is Power BI is built off of Excel, right? I always call it Excel on steroids. And so, I mean, most people already know Excel, but Power BI is honestly just much beefier, much faster and it produces much better results than Excel. So my recommendation is take somebody who you trust, who you can trust with the company's data set. Right. And if you know, they've been doing excellent analysis and reporting in Excel already, then promote them to using Power BI. Give them one week, right. Get them to take a week and just let them learn Power BI and I guarantee you'll get your return.

Chris Beall:

Yeah, that's an awesome suggestion. If you look at this report, that's the fake background behind me. That actually is a report it's called the attribution report, exists in ConnectAndSell. And it shows you how much money is in your pipeline from conversations you've had that have turned into meetings or conversations that were positive, or this green one over here is conversations that just happened, they didn't have any great outcome, but somehow you ended up with those folks in your pipeline. The person that I want is the person who looks at that and goes yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I like that export button up there, the one right above my head, because that gives it to me in Excel. And they would tell you what I'm curious about is, and they'll use the word pivot. And somebody who does that and they use the word pivot, that's the person that you want.

Chris Beall:

They think in terms of not just filtering, but also looking at the data from different angles, with different ways of summarizing because just to make a good pivot table and get it right, it takes that mental model of data that you want in your data concierge. So I'd be looking for that person. And I have somebody like that used to work at ConnectAndSell. I remember spending about two hours one day with, she was curious about Excel and really wanted to use it more for one of our customers that had a large amount of data, customers generating or consuming about 35,000 dials a day. And the question is, so what was going on with regard to problem connects in their use of ConnectAndSell? And the way to discover that was to take the raw data from the dials out for a period of time, look at the problem connects and then invert it and pivot it and find out well who had the most as a percentage of the whole and taking off some of the other connects because they sort of didn't count in the denominator.

Chris Beall:

And I remember teaching her to do this on a long phone call, on a phone call that turned into a zoom session and it kind of changed her career. She now is the head of sales of a pretty good size company and is doing fabulous, fabulous things. I would say the pivot is the pivot. That is somebody who loves pivots in Excel and really gets it. And they're hungry for those insights. That's the person that you want. Find out who loves the export from say, you're using Salesforce or using Dynamics. Somebody doesn't just look at the report, but they export the report. That would be my first question would be, so what's your preferred way of interacting with data that comes out in a report? And somebody says, look, I don't even look at the report. I just export it into Excel. And now I've got control, check.

Chris Beall:

You're coming closer. Well, what's your favorite way of figuring out what's going on in that report? You know, what's real. Well, I tend to eyeball it with some filters on it, just to see if I understand it. And then once I have a hypothesis, I'll select the data and I'll go ahead and I'll pivot. Really? Do you have an example of that? You know, and man, you're pretty close. Take that person, turn them loose on Power BI with all that extra power that's in it, I think you may have yourself your data concierge.

Tom Zheng:

Absolutely, absolutely. Spot on. That's where all good data analysts start from, right? Just not accepting the out-of-the-box reports of pre-summarized data and always trying to get to the truth by pivoting it themselves. And if you have somebody with a bit of a data engineering background, they can even say "You know what? I don't like always exporting to CSV or Excel. Why don't I try to connect directly to the system." Right? And then that makes things even faster when it comes to continuous analysis, because you don't have to constantly be exporting CSVs, because if you think about it, all this data comes from a system usually. And so why not directly connect to that system and link it to your analytical tool?

Chris Beall:

Well, we know the why not actually. The why not in general is that to do that, you have to go through the engineering department and you'll die before it gets done. But that's for a different episode. So we'll talk about that sometime.

Chris Beall:

Well, thanks so much, Tom. This has been spectacular. I know everybody who's used to Market Dominance Guys, we talk sales, sales, sales. Well, you do it right, you generate a lot of numbers, generate a lot of facts. You generate a lot of potential insights. If data is the new oil, you better get yourself some tools and techniques to go drilling and know which direction you're going and whether you're coming up with dry holes or whether you're coming up with black gold. And I can't thank you enough Tom I'm looking forward to our session tomorrow. I'll be in my car. So we're going to try something new. I'm driving to the airport. He's going to show me visualizations through my ears. While I drive on a road that has water on one side and big burly trees on the other that I don't want to collide with. So we're going to do this with great care, but Tom, thanks so much. This is spectacular.

Tom Zheng:

Thank you Chris, for the opportunity and it was great to share my insight.