Devoted to how insight is developed, shared and acted on
New Year Skills Review
The New Year is a good time for taking stock of your skill set - on both a personal level and across your team. The skills of a strong Insight team are many and varied, but here are five important abilities that an effective team should have:
1. Looking after key accounts. It’s not what you know but who you know that will ultimately determine your impact within your organisation. If you’re working behind closed doors all of the time or spreading yourselves too thinly, then you’re probably missing a trick. If you were running your own business, your success would depend upon your ability to look after your key accounts. You need to apply the same principles internally - by identifying your top key insight accounts or teams and managing them carefully.
2. Focusing on key issues. Make sure that any work that’s taking up your time addresses important business issues. For every request, discover the business issue or challenge involved - and keep digging until you find a financial implication. When times are hard, you can’t afford to be investigating ‘nice to know’ issues. You need to be sure that all of your work has the potential to make a difference.
3. Summarising information. Don’t get lost in the detail. If you know the key business issue, then you should also be able to summarise the answer succinctly. You may want to share more information or append more data depending on the needs and preferences of the audience, but always try to start with a short, sharp summary.
4. Evaluating opportunities. Your insights will carry more weight if you can put a value on them. Is the opportunity that you’ve identified worth £60,000 or £60 million? Do you risk losing accounts worth £50,000 or £500,000? By using your key business statistics and some fairly simple estimations, you could boost your credibility and influence enormously.
5. Headlining your results. Grab people’s attention with short, sharp headlines. Then get your key message across in your first sentence. This will make sure that your main outputs don’t get lost amongst a pile of unread emails. Don’t risk long introductions that busy people won’t bother to wade through.
Key account skills and summarising information are both covered in our Insight Management and Comms course.
Focus on key issues, and evaluating opportunities are central to our Commercial Thinking course.
And headlining is one part of our Impact Writing course. Do contact us for details.
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