MarTech Interview with Alan Jacobson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx

Alan Jacobson, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Alteryx talks about some of Alteryx’s recent product innovations and its benefits to marketing teams:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Alan – tell us about yourself and more about your role at Alteryx…

At Alteryx, I am focused on anticipating demand, reaching customers’ current needs, and looking forward as we build the tools customers need to quickly make data-driven decisions.

Prior to Alteryx, I spent more than 25 years in a variety of leadership roles at Ford Motor Company across engineering, marketing, sales, and new business development; most recently leading a team of data scientists to drive digital transformation across the enterprise. As an Alteryx evangelist at Ford, I spent many years leveraging the Alteryx platform and witnessed first-hand the impact a culture of analytics can have on the bottom line and what it takes to succeed as a data-driven enterprise.

Take us through some of Alteryx’s latest innovations and what’s in store for the year?

Alteryx continues to innovate, which includes the recent announcement of our new self-service and enterprise grade capabilities to the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform designed to help customers make quicker intelligent decisions.

The platform updates provide customers with Designer Cloud which offers an approachable easy-to-use drag-and-drop modern interface accessible to employees of all skill levels, while bolstering data governance and security standards.

The platform offers new capabilities to Alteryx Machine Learning enabling line-of-business analysts in finance, human resources, and marketing to make fast and improved forecasts. Aiding this is Metrics Store which helps business leaders make decisions around a trusted view of Enterprise KPIs. Additionally, the updates included Alteryx Auto Insights, designed to enable any business user to easily analyse and discover the root cause of complex issues with the new Common Causes feature. Common Causes gives users an even deeper understanding of what factors are impacting their most critical KPIs by providing them with an explanation of how performance is connected across two metrics over time. This feature allows marketers to quickly understand the impact of campaign expenditures by examining the relationship between campaign spend and leads generated.

These innovations come at a crucial time as Alteryx’s global 2023 State of Cloud Analytics Report  found that cloud analytics will be an enterprise imperative for thriving in 2023. Four out of five respondents expect cloud analytics to have a positive impact during economic uncertainty, and nearly 90 percent agreed cloud analytics have helped them be more profitable.

In addition to the updates made to the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform, we also announced Fanalytics, which is a new initiative showcasing analytic insights and applications across the most watched sports in the world. From players turning to analytics to improve their game to fans exploring insights on their favorite teams, Fanalytics demonstrates how data can impact decisions in professional sports. Alteryx has established new partnerships with professional sports organizations worldwide, including teams and players within F1, NBA, NFL, Premier League, and the PGA Tour.

Looking forward, we’re hosting Alteryx Inspire on May 22-25, 2023, in Las Vegas, where we will announce even more innovation.

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When it comes to using data and analytics to drive customer journeys and outcomes: how do you see B2C and B2B brands falter in today’s market?

The digital space continues to grow. Along with that growth is increasing pressure on data teams to produce the necessary insights that inform decisions and empower innovation that improve the user’s experience. Many companies solely rely on these data teams, while also struggling with staff shortages due to the skills gap. This creates a silo of data that makes the data process inefficient, which makes it easy for companies to lean on gut feelings or opinions based on prior experiences when making business decisions. In fact, according to an Alteryx-commissioned IDC InfoBrief  report, “The overwhelming majority of survey respondents say that only about half of business decisions in their organization are made based on analytics.”

Expanding access to data and analytics is the key to alleviating this issue, as utilizing it lets companies make choices in a data-driven way that provide positive outcomes for users, rather than hoping and guessing.

What practices do you feel technology marketers/B2B marketers need to put in place to leverage data processes that enable better customer and brand outcomes?

To keep pace with today’s customer demands, B2B marketers need to understand their customers and act in meaningful ways on their behalf. Analytics are central to this goal, whether understanding the customer’s journey, drivers of satisfaction, or customer segmentation to provide precision marketing or marketing attribution analyses. World-class marketing organizations leverage analytics at every step of the marketing funnel.

Core to delivering these capabilities and using the analyses effectively is a workforce that not only can understand the data and pre-built analyses, but a marketing team that can continuously find new data sources and add new analyses to drive the business forward. While those new to the workforce may have learned some of these techniques in school, prior to entering the workforce, organizations will want to invest in those that still need to learn these capabilities through upskilling programs.

An example of how upskilling a team with an analytics platform is seen with a major racing company that invested in Alteryx to help drive data-driven decisions.  After a very short sprint to train employees, they quickly began to optimize their performance across several different business functions. Results then started to pour in, powered by the data they had throughout their organization. Not only did they optimize their performance on the track and other internal functions, but they were also able to understand their own fans better than before. Having a platform that provides a deeper layer of understanding to that fan data, while correlating with lifestyle partner location data, lets the company’s marketing teams create new, greater engagement opportunities.

What are some of the top challenges around personalization and tracking that you see marketers struggle with still and what tips would you share?

Today’s marketers struggle to find talent that can quickly wrestle their data and squeeze out insights. Finding analytically enabled marketers can be incredibly difficult, and finding tools that can grow with the customer over time is equally challenging. This means companies become inefficient in creating personalized experiences as they simply don’t have the people pulling the data needed for it.

When organizations democratize data with the right tools to make data-driven decisions. Additionally, teams too often have their data put into disparate systems that make it challenging for them to merge the data and gain valuable insight. Without that insight, teams become unable to identify and prioritize the correct information to leverage towards personalization and improving the customer experience.

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A few common misconceptions about the modern state of marketing and martech you’d like to dispel?

Many marketers believe that attribution analyses, lead scoring, lead routing, funnel analyses, and other basic analytic needs are out of reach for their marketing teams. The reality is that having a marketing team that not only deeply understands these analyses but is also part of designing how the pieces work within their businesses is incredibly valuable.

With this type of understanding, they are then able to tackle a wide array of ad-hoc questions that come in every day as an operator in this space. Assuming that marketing professionals don’t need or want to become analytically enabled is likely not only the most common misconception, but likely one that puts your organization’s success at the most risk.