Madoff, Intelligence and Lost Customers

By Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView

What do the Bernie Madoff scandal and lost deals/customers have in common? They are the result of poor intelligence.Fortunately, while we can’t turn back the clock on Madoff, every day we have new opportunities to compete for customers.

Let’s take a look at the Madoff scandal. There were multiple warnings, from many different sides, that something was very wrong at Madoff Securities. Warnings from credible sources (such as Harry Markopolous) started as early as 1999, but it took the SEC almost 10 years to take them seriously.  I don’t believe the SEC acted in bad faith, but instead that the warnings got lost in the sea of information that constantly floods the SEC, and hence nobody recognized the pattern early enough. Lots of less important data drowned out the relevant intelligence. For those of you familiar with signal to noise ratio, you can think of intelligence as signal and data as noise.

Where am I going with this? I see this happening every day in the business worlds. Deals are lost, customers walk, opportunities are completely overlooked because sales professionals are unable to triangulate on the “right information at the right time.” Maybe they missed a news article about one of their customers or prospects that pointed to a clear opportunity. Or they didn’t see a key connection to a decision-maker. Or they didn’t see the background of a new executive at one of their customers, an executive that turned out to be a threat to the relationship. You might miss these vital pieces of information, but not all of your competitors will.

So what’s the answer? It’s definitely NOT more data. In all the examples above, the data exists and in fact it’s too much data that contributes to our inability to recognize an opportunity or threat. Instead, we believe the answer is better technology that can highlight relevant information for us, boosting the signal to noise ratio, and helping us make better decisions. What’s important to me is different than what’s important to you, which is also different from what’s important to the SEC. So technology obviously can’t be one-size-fits-all, it has to be customizable. And it needs to be easily accessible in the applications and devices that we use every day (CRM, e-mail, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.).

Paraphrasing the 1992 election, “It’s all about relevance, stupid.”

Umberto Milletti is the cofounder and CEO of InsideView, the pioneering on-demand Sales 2.0 application for the enterprise.  He has been a thought leader in the convergence of technology and content for the last decade. Prior to founding InsideView, he was co-founder of DigitalThink, where he led the company to a successful IPO, growing annual revenues to $60 million, and ultimately to its sale to Convergys in 2004.

Comments

[Josiane]

Great post and good analysis. Salespeople just like many of the Madoff victims feel betrayed and tend to drown in dirty data. Easy and clean accessibility is where it's at.