Data analysis report, so that the audience will not touch their phones

Many newcomers complain that they don't really have the opportunity to do analysis, but sometimes writing a report and giving a report are not the same thing. How would you report to different audiences? What are the secrets to get people to listen to your report carefully?

Do you have a problem: writing a report is one thing, and presenting it is another? Many newcomers complain that they only have daily, weekly, and monthly reports every day, and they don’t have the opportunity to do real analysis.

But often, when he is given an opportunity to give a report, within 5 minutes of the lecture, the audience takes out their mobile phones and happily rubs them - what's wrong! Today we will take a simple example to see.

Suppose a company has 5 business lines, and the performance is as shown in the figure below. Affected by the overall environment, the performance in February and March was very bleak. In order to improve the performance, the marketing department launched an event in April, with a 20% discount on all items, no threshold, and all employees participated! The event was carried out until the 15th, and the performance data generated was as shown in the figure below (the performance was evenly generated throughout the month, and there was no month-end rush):

The division of labor among the various departments of the enterprise is as follows:

• Sales Department: Responsible for sales of each business line
• Marketing Department: responsible for event planning, organization and execution
• Supply chain: responsible for product supply and inventory management. Now, leaders and colleagues from all departments want to hear the activity analysis report.

Question: How would you report to these people? Further question: There are so many figures here, do you have to report them to every department and every group?

01 The secret to getting people to listen carefully to your report

Think back to when you were in school. When it was the fourth period in the morning and you were so hungry that your stomach was growling, what did you want to hear the most? It was definitely not how to solve this quadratic equation. Most likely you were staring at the clock to see how many minutes were left, waiting for the teacher to say "get out of class is over".

Everyone is like this: everyone only wants to hear what they care about and doesn’t care about anything else. So if you want people to listen to your report, you have to know what they care about.

Obviously, people from different departments and different levels focus on different things. To understand what they care about, we have to start with the department's responsibilities and working methods. For example, in this event, the three departments focused on completely different things:

You will find that although the existing data seems to be a lot, it is not enough for some needs and more data is needed; for some needs, just a few numbers are enough. At the same time, there are differences between leaders and employees (as shown in the figure below).

Therefore, it is very important to understand the audience clearly before giving a report. Generally, we will ask:

• How long does the report take?
• Which departments are the people who listened to the report from?
• Is the leader here? Which level of leader?

Once you understand these, you can develop more targeted reports.

02 Reporting method that is tailored to the situation

1. To Sales Department

First of all, it should be clear: the sales department cares about performance, and activities are only a small part of performance.

Therefore, when reporting to the sales department, the main title should be "April Performance Report" and the first page should talk about the actual/expected performance in April (as shown below).

Secondly, pay attention to the performance details and provide a basis for leaders to deploy troops:

Finally, when facing subordinates, you can affirm the achievements of line AB and encourage them to continue to act. People in line DE must have complaints to express, so you can use the opportunity of the report to let them communicate with AB to see if there are any problems, which will also leave clues for subsequent in-depth analysis.

2. To Marketing Department

First of all, it should be clear: the marketing department is concerned with activities, and performance is just the result of activities.

So when reporting to the marketing department, the title should be "April Activity Report", and the first page should talk about the difference between activities and no activities. Note that this involves: what is the performance without activities, or the question of natural growth rate.

Here, we use the increase in March VS February as the natural growth, and conclude that the April event did not drive much growth. This conclusion is very likely to be challenged by the marketing department! The marketing department is likely to say: If we don’t do the event, the natural growth rate is negative! You can’t evaluate it this way! It can be seen that the natural growth rate is one of the most tangled issues in event evaluation.

Teacher Chen also has a special sharing about the natural growth rate. Natural growth rate article: The ultimate question of data analysis: How to calculate the natural growth rate reasonably! Secondly, pay attention to the details of the activity and provide a basis for the leaders' following decisions:

• Will there be an increase this month?
• Will you do it next month?

Finally, if you are facing your subordinates, you can first affirm the achievements of the activity to let them know that you are on their side. Then take this opportunity to talk about the follow-up plans and find out their next plans, thus leaving clues for in-depth analysis.

3. To supply chain

First, the supply chain is not concerned about the performance itself, but the impact of the performance on inventory/production, especially when there was a serious backlog in February and March. Although it seems that there has been an improvement in April, whether this improvement can clear the inventory and whether it will cause new shortages is what they are most concerned about. Therefore, the same performance data may look completely different to the supply chain.

Generally speaking, although there was an increase in April, it did not make up for the shortfall in January and February. This means that the inventory situation may not have improved, and the supply chain should not be overly optimistic. As for a more accurate analysis, this data is powerless.

If you want to make an accurate analysis, you need to get accurate inventory consumption/production cycle data, and break it down to the raw material stocking/production status of each category, ABCDE. There is nothing you can do here.

If in-depth analysis is required, you can record the requirements and do in-depth analysis later.

03 Common problems for beginners

The actual situation is far more complicated than this example, but through this simple example, we can see that even with the same data, the interpretation and data report format can be completely different when faced with different people.

This requires us to be able to adapt to the situation, have a clear understanding of the business situation and the division of labor and responsibilities of departments, and have our own judgment on business issues. This is exactly what newcomers lack the most. Even newcomers deliberately ignore it.

Most novices find a fixed data set and fill in the data according to the report template and the sample data table.

Moreover, this template often teaches novices to list the content along the steps of "analysis background-analysis objectives-data sources-data cleaning-indicator interpretation-modeling process-analysis conclusions-analysis suggestions". It seems comprehensive, but in fact it is long and boring and useless.

Even with this simple example, we see that:

1. In an enterprise, there is never a data set that can analyze all problems clearly. Problems are often discovered by monitoring some data, and then other data are used for verification after discussion, which requires associating multiple sets of data.

2. In the enterprise, there is never a fixed analytical approach. Every problem must be dealt with based on the business scenario. Even if the scenario changes a little, the way of organizing data will be different.

3. In the enterprise, there is no fixed template for reporting. No one wants to listen to empty talk every day. Data reporting will only be effective if it hits the issues that the audience cares about most.

These are all things that cannot be solved by a template, a data set, or a paradigm. Excellent data analysts have specific business problems in mind, and then use data to explain the problems and discover new data from the problems.

The workers on the assembly line are the ones who tighten the screws on the template, and every operation is exactly the same.

The above is a warning to everyone.

Many students will certainly say after giving this example: This is too ideal, it is very complicated in actual work.

But what’s interesting is that only by breaking down complex and specific problems into small modules can we explain them clearly and accurately with data.