Winter is coming - its essential you know your opportunity.

Written by Brian Higson

For those fans of the Games of Thrones medieval fantasy, in the first series we are introduced to the various geographical settings and the characters in the show. One of the lead characters is Ned Stark, we see him getting increasingly entwined in court politics after the king chooses him to replace the recently deceased chief administrator (“Hand of the King”). He is forced to relocate to King’s landing, leaving some of his family behind, he starts the complex journey of understanding Strategy, Structures, People, Processes, Politics, History, and Governance. Throughout the episode we are constantly reminded that “Winter is Coming” and so the scene is set…

So, what has this got to do with knowing your opportunity?

You only need to watch the news or read online feeds to be reminded that all is not well in our world as we try to guess what impact this will have on the future operations of our organisations as we endeavour to position ourselves to quickly respond to these changing conditions and continue to meet our operational goals, securing our ongoing position.

We can’t do this unless we have a good understanding of what we have, what opportunities we are currently addressing, and the opportunities we are potentially missing? The problem is we don’t have a crystal ball to foretell the future, but we know from history that when things do start to get unstable, business spending is restricted whilst we all try work out what is happening.

Within most organisations we have purposely collected information in various repositories, sales in financial systems or spreadsheets, customer and prospect contact information in CRM’s (albeit of varying quality and accuracy), and internal and external correspondence in documents and emails. We rely on key people within the organisations to collate and make sense of this, let’s call them the “super-connectors”. When times get tough, cash is tight, and the market is changing, we often lose access to these “super-connectors” and things don’t quite work as well as they once did.

So how do we minimize this emerging risk?

We supplement the structured corporate information that we collated within our core systems with increasing volumes of unstructured data that tends to be scattered across our network drives and various repositories to try and make sense of the world and to identify potential opportunities that have lower barriers to entry. Whilst we know we have sold one product to an existing client, what other products in our offering may they be interested in? We have already done a lot of the hard work in establishing our relationship with them, they have bought from us previously so all the billing and approval processes are already in place, we have contacts within their operation that can help us navigate into other sectors, and yet we spend most of our time trying to identify new candidates and new customers that we know will take time and effort. Time may not be our friend.

If you can relate to this scenario, we have assisted other organisations by importing their data into our SightXR data analytics and visualization platform to help identify sales opportunities from within this new data store.

The process is simple, you provide us with the data you have available, we produce the model and together we analyse, then visualize the data to identify opportunities.

Schedule a time with us to get started.