INSIGHT on INSIGHT: From the What to the Why to the What If

Almost every employee, in any company, regardless of their position, has the daily opportunity to acquire and apply insight to make better decisions.

Over time, employees that consistently do this gain experience and intuition and competence that reflects the compounding effect of these daily insights.  Meanwhile, employees that ignore or are unaware of similar insights get dated skillsets that eventually result in lower quality, less productive work.

If you have a job that requires you to make decisions, you have the opportunity to use insights everyday. 

In this sense, insight is a skill required for any job.  Some insight manager positions may be dedicated to the acquisition of external insight, but everybody should be proficient in the ability to identify and apply internal insights as part of a personal continuous improvement program.

Seeing buyers make favorable decisions based on a certain data visualization or storytelling technique will probably cause you to take a similar approach in the future.

Knowing that a certain program failed to deliver ROI in the past will probably make you more hesitant to repeat it in the future.

Learning new functionality in Microsoft Excel can be a simple yet powerful insight that saves lots of time and significantly improves the quality of your analysis.

BEYOND CAUSE AND EFFECT

These are all examples of cause and effect.  They represent the benefit of learning how manipulating one variable can lead to a better or more favorable output of another variable.

But great insight gets beyond the what and to the why and to the what if.  Great insight reveals a little more about the inner workings of the machine.

The goal isn’t to decode a single message.  It is to understand the overall encryption so future messages can be just as easily decoded.  And it should help predict behaviors when certain variables exist in certain situations.

In this sense, true insight should help understand why the buyer said yes and why the program failed to deliver ROI.  By doing this, it should reveal more opportunities and more issues.  But it should also help predict the success of future approaches to address those existing opportunities or issues.

Understanding the why creates the possibility of finding more or better approaches that might even allow you to start reverse engineering more of these decision-making systems.

Shoppers think my product is overpriced…but why is it viewed as a poor value?

The buyer doesn’t believe my product will deliver incremental sales…but why does s/he not believe my projections?

With insight, you can find solutions other than lowering the price to improve your product’s value perception.  You can test how shoppers will react to changing claims or benefits or features.  You can quantify how many shoppers and dollars should actually be incremental.

With insight, you can talk to buyers in a language they understand and believe.  You can have multiple insight-supported storylines to pick from and select the one that is most compelling.

INSIGHTS ARE TOOLS

Insight provides answers, understanding and direction:

FINDING INSIGHT IS LIKE INVESTIGATING A CRIME SCENE:  The better you are at it, the more clues you’ll notice while trying to answer ‘who did what and why?’ on your way to ultimately answering the question “who (what prime prospects) do I want to do what (buy my product) and how can I convince them to do it (what content or call to action best matches their desires or will motivate them to respond)?”

USING INSIGHT IS LIKE GOOGLE TRANSLATOR:  Without understanding the language of your shoppers, every message is confusing.  With limited understanding, it is still easy to misinterpret the meaning.  But once you learn how to read your shopper, what looked liked irrational gibberish can suddenly become an easy-to-follow instruction manual of what needs to be done to attract and retain more buyers.

HAVING INSIGHT IS LIKE HAVING GPS:  It tells you how to get where you want to go and prevents you from getting lost.  And it is even smart enough to find new paths if the original route proves to have too many barriers.

Any of this sound useful? 

Keep reading to master the discovery of cause and effect among your shoppers and learn the power of getting beyond the what and to the why and the what if?

You’ll get there by learning how to ask better questions, get better answers, do better analysis and arrive at better conclusions leading to more successful actions.