A good friend of mine, who I have known since high school works in a car dealership. We talk quite often about the trials and tribulations, pros and cons, even the risks and rewards of our chosen career paths. I always enjoy his perspective on how they measure their sales efficiencies.

I was fascinated to learn that they actually try to determine the number of qualified car shoppers that visit their lot each month. No surprise that they also monitor the number car sales each month, and that they try to maintain an acceptable ratio of shoppers to sales.  To be clear, my fascination was not simply that this was occurring – but that they tried to only quantify the ‘qualified’ car shoppers. They do their best to not factor in the kids, ‘tire kickers’ and other unqualified people who visit the lot with no intention of purchasing a new car in their manual performance reports. Fascinating.

Like most who don’t live and breathe eCommerce/analytics/optimization, my friend was not aware of the many tools widely available today to online businesses.  Methods to essentially provide the same sort of physical performance reporting that they do by hand.

All this business intelligence talk exposed some critical differences as well.

Now the manual subjective nature of qualifying people has huge room for error, but the intent is genuine. Some kids may just want to sit in the new Challenger – Great. But they don’t represent a lost sale.

Even with more sophisticated automated reporting tools, I don’t talk to many people who dissect their online business in the same manor.

The parallels are obvious – If you don’t ship outside of North America, why not generate a North American conversion report (for example)?

My take: Online stakeholders need to start to think about business analysis differently. This is not about better dashboards, reports, and ones and zero’s collected by your website. Real people are interacting with your brand, your store, and your products. Get to know them.

~~~~~~

Track me down in Vegas next week ……..Vegas, baby. Vegas.

D.