WEBINAR: Driving efficiency in a saggy economy

By James Cuthbertson

Unfortunately, it feels like every Insight team in every brand or agency will soon be faced with some hard questions and added pressures during the advancing inclement economic times we all face.

Relative Insight is a purveyor of text analytics technology, and of course it has traditionally been our prerogative to take the unhelpful position of “I know it’s tough out there but still buy our stuff,.. yeah?” but in my view the paradigm of a value exchange will truly continue to exist between vendor and customers, prospects and the industry at large as we navigate the next recession together – and I’m not just saying this because I would, wouldn’t I.

As the CRO of Relative, it’s incumbent on me to leverage some of the learnings from hundreds of the Insights teams who we work with, and chat with every day – and so in our last Spotlight Series webinar of 2022, I’d like to give you some anecdotes, examples of hive mind thinking, and even dare I say it – advice.

I’ll be joined by Richard Thornton who among other things, sits on the board at Relative Insight and who brings his 20-years of experience of scaling, efficiency and expansion within the data and insights space to the fore. Between us, we’re confident that you’ll come away from this webinar with some action points and a plan.

During the session, I’m going to elaborate on the these four pointers for Insights teams in a saggy economy – there will be loads of time for Q&A, so please come ready to ask us anything!

1. Shop the closet

Identify the work, projects and findings that your team, or relevant others have done in the last 12 months which can be repurposed, built on and improved rather than commissioning brand new work from scratch. I’m not saying do the same work again, rather you need to think differently about that same work – find new angles, slice it differently, or layer existing data in a new way. We’ve seen a number of customers save five-figure amounts by reworking existing projects in our platform. They’ve simply reanalysed the data they’ve already collected, and then been able to deliver strong new outcomes quickly and cheaply.

2. Cute outsourcing

There are amazing tools at hand like Fiverr and Upwork that allow you to very inexpensively outsource aspects of your current insights process. Think about the last time you sat down and really looked at your playbook step-by-step and critically assessed where you could save money. It’s easy to make efficient cuts by outputting some creation and design work -such as presentations, as well as some of the more manual work with messy data files.

3. Sweat your vendors

An easy way to assess your vendor relationships is to refer to my simple matrix model which I’ll share with you. Vendors – if you’re reading this, have a think about where insights teams would place you! If there are any suppliers or partners in your stack that you can identify as a toxic mix of ‘unhelpful’ and ‘nice to have’, then now is the time to cut them loose.

4. Action, efficacy, outcomes

Insight leaders I am talking to you more directly now! As a Head of or Director, it is part of your role – now more than ever, to be the fulcrum between your team and senior internal (or external if you are agency-side) customers and stakeholders.

So far, so obvious, you may say but, what I mean more prescriptively is that your role is to ensure you have the ear and attention of a senior stakeholder, who both requires answers from the work you are commissioning, and to ensure that you have collectively agreed that the need for insights is to realistically inform action.

My hope is that I can elicit thought, reaction and possibly even action – both sides of the table with my four themes for efficiency.

It remains true that a mobilised and focused Insight function with teeth can be the making of a great business, we just have some slightly different currents to contend with over the coming months.

Rather than list passively along directed by forces out of our control, I encourage you to act decisively to head off potential challenges ahead – sign up now, and we’ll see you on December 15!

The details:
Date: Thursday, December 15
Time: 4pm GMT / 11am EST
Register here

If you can’t make it on the day, then register anyway and we’ll send you an on-demand link to the recording.