Storytelling with Data – Part II – Getting to “What”

By Ollie, the Marketing Performance Mutt… regular contributor to the Heinz Marketing Blog.  See my inaugural post “Storytelling with Data – Starting with Why and How.
In August’s blog post, I suggested building Executive Business Review reports with the focus on the Why and How. Why a number is what it is, Why that line is trending upward or downward and How to maintain it or fix it.
Now, let’s look at What. What should we do? What can we do to improve on a particular KPI? Whether correcting a negative number or continuing to grow a positive number. This is where the real magic happens in Executive Reviews – prescriptive, strategic direction informed by data.
I have not been around all that long (I am only 7 in human years after all), but what I have seen is that most businesses are not very sophisticated in their data analytics and reporting to