The Data Driven Leader: A Powerful Approach to Delivering Measurable Business Impact Through People Analytics by Jenny Dearborn & David Swanson

Author:Jenny Dearborn & David Swanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-27T12:00:00+00:00

“I hear you, Marcus. Certainly, factors other than engagement impact revenue, as we’ll hear from Chloe,” answered Pam, “but I’m fairly sure Exalted leadership isn’t aware of how dramatically retention, engagement, and revenue are plummeting in parallel. Combined with the service-profit chain and the studies you mentioned, it will be hard to refute that these issues are related.”

“OK, Chloe, I’ll bite,” Martha volunteered. “Why is engagement taking such a nose dive?”

“Well, not surprisingly,” Chloe answered, “for sales reps it’s a combination of the factors we’ve been talking about. The lowest five employee engagement survey scores among disengaged reps are related to compensation, fair treatment, manager support, development opportunities, and belief in the company. But scores that trend downward so steeply generally indicate that either the company isn’t doing anything in response to employee feedback—or what they are doing isn’t working.”

“Also,” added Pam, “in the last few Exalted annual reports, the engagement numbers presented a pretty rosy picture. I assume that’s because of pressure from above to gloss over the facts, something that can’t continue. We need transparency and accountability about our survey results and how we’re trying to improve them, or our scores will continue to suffer, as will our employer brand.”

Marcus and Martha looked at each other in relief. They knew the previous CHRO had been ineffective, to say the least, at persuading Exalted leadership to deal with the company’s engagement issues, and they even suspected the board was in the dark.

“You’ll be pleased,” announced Chloe, “that the last two findings have nothing to do with HR. The seventh ecosystem factor is price.”

“I was right!” exclaimed Marcus in amazement.

“Yep,” said Pam with a smile. “I told you all of you have great sales instincts. And Chloe has made yet another critical discovery with her analytics. Talk us through it.”

“I got the first clues about pricing when I looked at exit interviews, engagement survey comments, and results from the manager/rep surveys I sent out,” Chloe began. “A lot of reps said they couldn’t sell our products because competitors are undercutting us. From this publicly available data, we are clearly still in the premium pricing tier relative to our next two biggest competitors,” she said, advancing to the next slide.

“Notice that when Zenith Co. entered the market with a lower-priced product in 2015,” Chloe continued, “Apex Inc. quickly responded by lowering its prices, and kept lowering them until they were actually below Zenith Co. But Exalted has basically stayed the course.”

“I don’t see the issue,” Marcus admitted, looking perplexed.

“Well, charging premium prices only works if customers are willing to pay the premium, because the company is truly offering premium products—innovative and results focused. But that’s not what’s happening, based on this simple win/loss analysis using customer relationship management, or CRM, data,” said Chloe, advancing to the next slide.

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