The Analyst's Guide to Empowering a Culture of Analytics With Alteryx

Steps to Building a Data-Driven Culture

Companies that embrace an end-to-end culture of analytics are agile, flexible, and able to seize business-defining opportunities before the competition spots them. That doesn’t mean they’re keeping up with every trend — they’re simply maximizing their data and acting on analytic insights, including predictive and prescriptive analytics.

Your organization may not be quite there yet. Like most companies out there, your reality probably looks more like…

• Information trapped in data silos
• Analysis dragged down by manual processes
• Limited time to spend generating the insights that matter
• Opportunities missed before they’re even recognized

As an Analytics Champion, you have a bigger vision. Chances are, you’re already using AI-powered analytics via Alteryx, so you know what it would mean for your company’s future if your entire organization could access data from anywhere, build automated workflows, and use AI to spot hidden patterns, build models, and generate reports for stakeholders.

The Doorway to Business-Changing Insights

The possibilities are endless. Just ask the analysts at DoorDash, who save 25,000 hours each year using automated analytics.

Read More

Still, pushing for a wholesale shift may feel daunting. To enable an end-to-end analytics approach, you’ll need to convince a big group of stakeholders (including your boss) that there’s a strong business case for culture change — and drive home the real cost of doing nothing at all.

Not to worry. Armed with this guide, you can build the momentum you need for buy-in across your organization. You’ll identify your stakeholders and activate your ecosystem with a great pitch tailored to each stakeholder’s needs — we’ll show you how.

Craft Your Pitch

Map Out Your Decision-Making Ecosystem

Transforming your company’s data culture with Alteryx will require action up and down the organization and across lines of business. You may be wondering where to start — but the path to organization-wide adoption is not always linear.

For best results, we recommend you activate your entire decision-making ecosystem by engaging three fronts simultaneously: your manager, your fellow analysts and data scientists, and your expanded network. You’re likely to encounter resistance in some spots but enthusiasm in others, and sparking that enthusiasm is what can ignite the culture change you’re looking for.

Celebrate small wins — every Alteryx free trial download provides actual business value and is a gateway to realizing your bigger dream. This is true for analysts, data scientists, and even department heads. The path to convincing each audience is different, so you’ll want to develop a strong baseline pitch that can be customized as needed.

Your Ecosystem: The Key Trio

• Your boss
• Your fellow analysts and data scientists
• Your expanded network of decision-makers

Sell the Big Picture

As an Alteryx champion, clearly communicating your vision for the end goal is your most important task, no matter which stakeholders you’re addressing. If you’ve had some great personal or departmental wins thanks to Alteryx, you’re probably thinking of sharing those and hoping they’ll light a fire. However, you’ll reap even bigger rewards if you think carefully about your organization’s goals first.

As you’re crafting your pitch, you should have a few overarching points in mind. Your mantra: Alteryx expands access to easy-to-use analytics to scale insights and impact. This is how successful companies approach analytic transformations, and it’s the way that yields the quickest and longest-lasting results.

What can Alteryx do for you?

• Access data from anywhere
• Integrate multiple data sources for streamlined ETL/ELT
• Quickly prep, enrich, and cleanse your data
• Automate repetitive tasks and perform unlimited analysis with 300+ drag-and-drop analytic building blocks
• Perform advanced analytics with geospatial, predictive, and prescriptive capabilities
• Build reports and directly integrate with visualization tools to communicate insights effectively

Quick Wins
80%of users see measurable business value in the first 14 days of trying the platform.

Make a Targeted Business Case

Which business goals are foremost on leadership’s mind? Here are a few to get started:

• Increasing revenue
• Increasing efficiency
• Increasing market share
• Increasing customer satisfaction
• Decreasing risk
• Decreasing costs

Your pitch should connect the dots between the benefits of Alteryx and the goals that drive your leaders. On a more granular level, as you customize your pitch for different stakeholders, refer to the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most important to each line of business or business function. (If you don’t know what those KPIs are, don’t be afraid to ask.) Some quick examples:

• Sales: bookings, average size per sale, quote-to-close ratio, average conversion time, number of open opportunities, sales per rep
• IT: number of tickets that violate SLAs, improved data quality, greater security
• Marketing: number of qualified leads, net promoter scores, contribution to pipeline

Then, ask yourself: How can a better analytics process help each stakeholder meet their KPIs and goals? That’s the case you’ll have to make each time you tweak your pitch for a different audience.

Strengthen Your Case With Statistics

On the Value of a Data-Driven Culture

To learn more about how advanced decision intelligence technologies are impacting the ways that large-scale organizations make decisions, we surveyed 2,800 enterprise leaders in various industries — across technology, financial services and banking, retail, and manufacturing in 12 countries. Key findings from our report include:

• 80% of leaders said that access to data improves their decision-making.
• 53% of respondents believe that granting more employees access to data and analytics tools would result in better collaboration.​
• 45% say that employees having more access to data would result in quicker decision-making, and 48% believe it would improve productivity if more employees had access to data.

On the Value of AI and Analytics

Other industry research has continually shown the value of analytics and AI in organizational decision-making and success:

• For organizations that go “all in” on AI, at least 20% of their EBIT (earnings before interest and tax) came from AI.
• The global big data analytics market is expected to grow exponentially from $307.54 billion in 2023 to 924.4 billion by 2032.
• GenAI can increase workforce productivity by an average of 14%.
• On average, companies see a 6-10% increase in business revenue after adopting AI

Make Your Story Personal

The most compelling part of your pitch will be your own before-and-after story — showing how Alteryx changed your workday and enabled you to do better analysis faster. It’s the reason you’re a champion, so let your enthusiasm shine through.

Underlying that story will be the numbers that make your case. Start gathering them now in the prep phase:

• Measure how much time you spend finding, prepping, and blending data for new and repeating analysis problems that aren’t automated.
• Don’t forget to include the time you spend recreating the wheel — that is, building information assets that may already exist but aren’t accessible to you.
• Calculate the time you spend on manual analytics in spreadsheets.

Then …

• Measure the time differences using Alteryx (they may be exponential).
• Show any strategic problems you were able to tackle in the time you freed up.
• Point out any cross-departmental barriers you’ve broken down with AI-powered analytics.
• Share questions you’ve dreamed up about challenges your company faces.

Keep These Pitching Tips in Mind

Tell a good story.

Every story starts with a hero who faces a conflict or a villain. That’s you — and the villain in your story is likely the risks, errors, and inefficiencies from manual, spreadsheet-based analytics. With the help of Alteryx, you were likely able to reach a new level of analytics proficiency. That was your transformation (story resolution), and it’s this transformation that will inspire stakeholders to take action — as they’ll see the value of Alteryx when it comes to their own analytics or their team’s workflows.

Touch on the emotional drivers that influence business decisions.

Close your pitch with a sense of urgency — if you can, quantify the cost of waiting to implement AI-powered analytics. Chances are good your competitors are already making an investment in data to gain an edge, and fear of missing out (loss aversion) is a powerful motivator. A simple calculation of opportunity cost can go a long way at this stage in the process.What has Alteryx given you as an analyst?

• More time
• Cleaner data
• Better questions
• Faster answers
• Smarter insights

Don’t vent.

Emphasize the future, not the past. Stay upbeat and focused on solutions, not a laundry list of past problems and wrongdoings.

Know your target’s convincing style.

This is especially true for your direct manager, whose preferences you probably know well. Tilt your argument toward data, expert authority, compelling anecdotes, or the specific value props of the decision-maker, depending on what’s most likely to persuade.

Use Hard-Hitting Real-World Examples

Next, support your pitch with examples of real Alteryx users who have experienced the full benefits of analytics transformation. Our customer center is a comprehensive source of success stories that can bolster your case for various industries or business problems.

This well-known convenience store chain — with nearly 70,000 stores in 17 countries — once suffered from data overload. Besides the routine challenges analysts faced in bringing all their data sources together coherently, they also relied on vendors to deliver reports, creating a delay that made acting on insights nearly impossible.

7-Eleven needed a data solution that everyone could use across the organization to collect data quickly, share it externally, and perform multiple functions affordably. So, they turned to Alteryx.

“We started with the standard 14-day trial for Designer to see if it could help organize our data sources,” said Director of Digital Analytics Srikanth Nayani. “After we went forward with downloading licenses, I was able to see very quickly how easy it was to follow the logic of a workflow. That level of oversight would be impossible in Excel. Now I’m able to bring all of our vendor data sources together in near-real time into one output to see what’s working and what’s not.”

• 100-hour vendor projects reduced to 1 hour
• 60% increase in efficiency
• 1 year of store sales data organized in 1 hour

Read Their Story
Browse Customer Center

Next Steps
If your pitch lands successfully, point your boss toward the resources below

6 Steps to AI-Ready Data
Virtual Product Tour
Alteryx Platform Details

Encourage Your Fellow Analysts

Pitching to your team may be the most fun you’ll have as an Alteryx Champion, and creating a groundswell among analysts provides a solid support base for your efforts. But this audience doesn’t need to be pitched to so much as engaged — share your experiences, encourage them to try the platform, and get them excited with a library of resources designed to meet them wherever they are.

Point them toward a free 30-day trial for cloud or desktop
Alteryx Free Trial

Empower those using Alteryx for the first time
Maveryx Academy

Kick-off success early in the Alteryx process
Alteryx Success Center

Connect new people to the Maveryx community
Visit the Community

Get Other Stakeholders Involved Early

Other line-of-business leaders and even your executive suite can be allies in the drive for digital transformation, so don’t wait to engage them. You may find support in surprising places — and those who are tougher to convince will be less likely to sabotage your efforts if they’re included from the start. Tailor your pitches to decision-makers’ unique needs, show them how Alteryx can help them achieve their goals, and point them to the next step on the path.

Line-of-Business Leader

Care-abouts: Making good decisions, automating repetitive tasks

Sound bites:

• Data-driven decisions
• Forward-looking insights
• Advanced analytics
• Business breakthroughs

IT

Care-abouts: Protecting sensitive information, dealing with backlog, balancing access and control in the IT structure

Sound bites:

• Improved visibility
• Unprecedented security
• Full automation
• Scalable governance

Executive Leadership and Finance

Care-abouts: Driving top-line growth, realizing bottom-line returns, mitigating business risk, fostering a data-driven culture, accelerating decision-making

Sound bites:

• Data-driven growth
• Culture of analytics
• Insights-driven business
• Organizational alignment

Empower a Culture of Analytics, One Step at a Time

Your first pitch for Alteryx is just the beginning of the journey toward becoming a data-driven enterprise, so plan to stay visible and be your organization’s source of truth. Whenever and wherever you can, measure value, spot opportunities, and share wins — and become a little bit of a hero in the process.

• Report your performance on KPIs not just to your boss but to other stakeholders.
• Offer to coach other departments on achieving their goals.
• Strike up a conversation with company leaders about how other global brands are blazing a trail with Alteryx and direct them to customer stories that will resonate.
• Follow up with your colleagues to see how their free trials are going or offer to help. Were they able to save time? Do more analysis? Pull in data easily from different sources? Our sales engineers can also help them pinpoint and think through use cases.

We also understand the challenges of bringing a company fully into the 21st century, so we’ve created a community to connect you and your team with others on the same journey. Join our Maveryx Community to share your experiences and get advice from other Analytics Champions who’ve been through the process.

Join the Maveryx Community

Once you provide the starting nudges, Alteryx has a way of creating momentum. We’re here to support you in any way we can. You can always ask our sales team a question at any time on the web or by phone: 1-888-836-4274.

About Alteryx

Alteryx powers actionable insights with the AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics. With Alteryx, organizations can drive smarter, faster decisions with a secure platform deployable in on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments. More than 8,000 customers globally rely on Alteryx to automate analytics to improve revenue performance, manage costs, and mitigate risks across their organizations.

Alteryx is a registered trademark of Alteryx, Inc. All other product and brand names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

DOWNLOAD PDF HERE