Narrate your business story by using your data the right way

Narrate your business story by using your data the right way

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.

Ahmed Elsamadisi is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder of Narrator, and he helps clients with data. In the new episode of the UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about data and why people make bad decisions with it. He also discussed how entrepreneurs and business owners can use it to build better businesses.

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A Common Pitfall

Data is one of those fields that everybody’s talking about. Everyone is trying to sell you something. But the first thing to know about data is that there’s a lot of misinformation. Everyone is saying, “Use data.”  

A common pitfall amongst entrepreneurs is they use data earlier than they should.

For Ahmed, using bad data is way worse than not using data at all. When people have bad data, they are more confident because they think they're data-driven. They end up running faster in the wrong decision.

On the contrary, when people don't have data at all, they're more cautious, more aware, and more alert. They might be starting the wrong decision, but they will notice something and change that.

Unless you're ready to really invest in data, Ahmed recommends keeping your bottom line metrics. It’s only when your data evolves that you’d want to invest more in doing data correctly.

Data and Definitions Game

Entrepreneurs can make wrong decisions based on bad definitions or definitions of data that aren’t accurate. And today, there are companies simplifying and packaging data in beautiful little bundles.

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What you don’t realise that they do is they’re abstracting away data and putting words to express data. Often, these words sound like something, but they mean something different. Or they sound like something that makes sense, but when you think deeper into it, it doesn't.

For instance, Facebook has been sued almost every single year for misleading customers with words like “total watches.”

You might think that you know what a “watch” means. It means that somebody watched the video. But if you think about it: Is scrolling past a video considered a watch? If they click on it, start watching, and pause it in one second, is it still a watch?

It’s also the same with, “This person came from AdWords.” What does it mean for a person to be attributed to AdWords? Google will tell you how they figured out their attribution model is proprietary. But how did they know someone who bought something from a business came from AdWords?

When you look at a funnel in tools like Amplitude, is that a first-time funnel or a recurring one?

These are questions that, when you start thinking about, will make you realise that data doesn't mean anything.

At Narrator, they do this analysis where they ask clients how many times they’ve double counted. They run that analysis for customers, showing them that a single sale can be reported four times in your email marketing tool or six times in your advertisement tool. The same sale can be attributed to Facebook, Google, and other ad sources. Every platform or channel is getting credit and thinking they got this sale when it doesn't make sense.

If you sum up all the sales from all your ad and email marketing tools, you'll get way more sales than you actually got because definitions are being manipulated, and you're missing that key place.

Question, Question, Question

If you’re an entrepreneur looking at data, do something that data analysts are incredible at: Questioning. What does this actually mean? Do you know what it really means?

Because often, we don’t know what something means. And companies have taken advantage of that for them to make a lot of money and for you to make the wrong decision and take your company in the completely wrong way.

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Here’s an example of how data can lead you to make the wrong decision:

When you look at a funnel to observe a customer’s purchasing behaviour, you’ll see if someone who came to your site bought a product. Over time, you might notice that the conversion rate of people who come for the first time and buy can look the same (for instance, 80%). In reality, that could include people who are already buying or have bought in the past. Or it could be early funnels.

You could be getting way worse even though your overall looks the same.

If it's based on every time someone comes to your site, if someone comes to your site four times in the same day, and then they buy, the conversion rate will be 25%.

When looking at something as simple as a funnel, you want to know what things really mean because they can tell you whether you're good, doing something bad, or performing much better right now.

If you don't know what that funnel tells you, you can make four different decisions: to go back, undo, redo, or change. And that will lead to something outside of the ordinary happening.

What Narrator Does

Narrator standardises data into a simple format that humans can understand. For entrepreneurs, these data refer to what your customers do over time. They can show you all the raw data and allow you to zoom in on any single row and see exactly what that customer did in time.

They call this “Building intuition.” It means you can refine your question by seeing a bunch of example customers and what they did. You can also exclude customers if they don’t fit what you’re looking for (for instance, that customer only came at this or that point of the customer journey).

By seeing example customer journeys — not just total aggregations — and getting down to the root level, you will be able to refine your question.

Image from Narrator

To connect data and be standardised, they use a thing called "Relationships," which is a human way of combining data. It allows you to control what you're actually getting and get that transparency.

With one click, you’ll be able to look at some piece of data and say, “How is this actually defined? And how is this assembled?” You can dive into example journeys to fully understand what the customer really did, and you can refine and iterate.

And that's the key thing: They don't just give you a bottom line metric (e.g., total sales) wherein you have no way of knowing what that means. What Narrator does is really empower you to understand your data.

The Not-So-Dashing Truth About Dashboards

One of the challenges with dashboards is that they give you a metric but not necessarily any prescription on what you should do with that data. And Ahmed believes that nothing has led to more bad decisions than dashboards.

The dashboard is the enemy of all the data. It allows the tool (where it’s a part of) to kind of be non-responsible. Companies that sell you dashboarding tools are not responsible for anything. They’ll simply give you a tool to put data and do whatever you want.

This level of “It’s not my fault” concept has made people subjective on using these tools. These companies’ nature is to make you build more dashboards and more plots. They use User Interface (UI) and other elements to nudge you to do that because it’s how they make money.

Image from Narrator

When Ahmed started Narrator, he was very angry at the dashboarding world. He vouched to do it differently. His business objective is not to get you to view dashboards but to get you to take action.

From having that objective, they’ve learned a bunch of things. One of which is that for you to take action, you must get coherent, consistent, and fact- and evidence-based stories. And that’s what a narrative is. If a narrative starts with a real question, it gives you a clear recommendation that you can actually do something with it.

Narrator doesn’t give you a straightforward “Get more leads.” It moves you from this campaign to this other campaign — it helps you understand what you're going to learn.

It gives you the conclusion up front, and it explains to you how it makes decisions. It provides you with the plots and the visualisations as evidence in a consistent way. It helps you walk through the story and learn why Narrator is making that recommendation — as if someone has literally written a story for you.

Looking at their customers’ experience, they learned that their customers could do two things: One, they can get actual action done based on the data. It’s because they can explain to the rest of the world how that data came to be. Two, they literally print them out. People don't print out dashboards. People print out stories telling their audience why they’re thinking of making a particular decision.

The biggest uniqueness of Narrator is that you’re not getting dashboards. You're getting stories where you can draw upon prescriptive advice or topics you can discuss with your management team.

An Aid for Entrepreneurs

Narrator isn’t a tool that gives you some fun facts. It lets you ask questions instead. After all, you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re the expert. You are doing this business, and your intuition is good.

Ahmed’s mentor always said that if data is very surprising to the person on the ground, then assume that the data's wrong. Because that person on the ground has really good intuition. What they're bad at is quantifying that intuition and identifying how bad or good something is.

Narrator only helps you take in those intuitions and ask real questions. It allows you to understand how to quantify things, learn their impact, and monitor them in time. Their tool is doing all that work for you so that you can actually have that discussion and can make the best decision.

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One of the biggest benefits of Narrator is that they aren’t taking your data at all. They can do everything without data ever leaving your system. They are what people call “warehouse native.”

Narrator, through their partners, help you take that data and dump it into a huge database — like a big folder structure. You own it in your system, and you can use that data now. They only restructure that data so that it makes sense, and you can use it to answer questions.

They’re providing a way to ask and answer questions with that data. All that data stays in your system, and you can see everything Narrator is doing. You can turn it off and control it. You can keep going or not use Narrator and keep the data your own: No external data are being used, and there's nothing outside of data that you already have.

You’ll be surprised, but you have a lot more data than you think. Because every system that has your data has a way to get the data out, and there are tools available that can take the data out for you instantly.

If you use Narrator, it can help you take all that data and move it to a place that you control.

A Unique Brand

Ahmed has been included in Forbes' 30 Under 30. He was able to build Narrator as a brand that’s unique and different: It’s doing something that people thought was impossible.

Whenever he and his team demonstrate their tool, the audience thinks it’s a magic show. They’re thinking and trying to find out what’s going on and what’s the catch. And they at Narrator have learned to lean into that.

This is how Ahmed explained how their product works during the podcast episode, and you can judge if it sounds magical or not:

Imagine a Microsoft Excel sheet. Narrator will take all your data, and they will put it into that sheet. And it will contain not a million columns, but just 11 columns. Using that 11-column sheet, they will answer any question you can come up with. It will work whether your data is in the e-commerce, banking, cryptocurrency, education, or media industry (Narrator has customers in all these sectors). It will also work even if you have thousands, a hundred thousand, or a hundred billion rows of data.

With Narrator, you can get data, see example journeys, and be able to generate full analyses to help you make the best decision.

Image from Freepik

Whenever Ahmed hops on stage to demonstrate their product live, he encourages the audience to ask him anything, and he’ll use their tool to answer those (They also use this strategy in their sales closing deck).

Some of the questions he gets are difficult questions that use multiple systems and data sources. For example: “I have a chatbot. Does that help me get more sales?” “Are people actually who submit a ticket actually engaging with our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) site?” “When people engage with our FAQ site, are they more likely to actually complete the ticket?”

What Ahmed does is take the data and show them from when someone visits a website and buys — and all that happens in between (e.g., Did they engage or start a chat?).

The narrative he always uses is “How does X impact Y?” For instance: How does the engagement with the chatbot make someone’s likelihood to order more? Their tool then narrows it down to generate a full story: It does work. It doesn't work. How has it been working over time? It might have worked in the past, but now it doesn't. It might not have, but now it does.

Then, it quantifies and explains things further: If you got 10% more people or 50% more people to engage with your chatbot, you could actually increase your conversion rate by another 10%. Narrator gives you a detailed description and allows you to simulate that impact.

Their company also has a bounty system that encourages people to find questions they can't answer. Over the years that Ahmed has been running Narrator, there have only been two questions that their tool couldn’t answer — and both of the answers were found by their internal data team.

Getting Narrator Noticed

How does Narrator get noticed? That “I can’t believe this” part is one thing. The second part is that people get excited by what their tool could enable. They’d realise it’s the first time they can share anything — from analyses to dashboards — across companies.

Because that underlying structure is the same, you can do, for example, a lifetime value (LTV) analysis and share it. You can open source your work for the first time. You don’t have to go to a consultant to get that LTV analysis. On Narrator, you can use templates that have been rated. They have experts that will run on your data that don’t just give you the answer but also explains to you, in English, how to think about these situations.

To learn more about data, data transparency, and definitions game, follow Ahmed on LinkedIn. You can also check out their website, www.narratordata.com. You can also email him directly at ahmed@narrator.ai.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.  

Cover image by ThisIsEngineering on Pexels