005 - Jason Krantz (Dir. of Biz Analytics/Insights, Weil-McClain) on centering analytics around internal customers
Jason Krantz is the Director of Business Analytics & Insights for the 135-year old company, Weil McLain and Marley Engineered Products. While the company is responsible for helping keeping homes and businesses warm, Jason is responsible for the creation and growth of analytical capabilities at Weil McLain, and was recognized in 2017 as a “Top 40 Under 40” in the HVAC industry. I’m not surprised given his posts on LinkedIn; Jason seems very focused on satisfying his internal customers and ensuring that there is practical business value anchoring their analytics initiatives. We talked about:
- How Jason’s team keeps their data accessible and relevant to the issue they need to solve for their customer.
- How Jason strives to keep the information simple and clean for the customer.
- How does Jason help drive analytics in a company culture with a lot of legacy (from its people to its parts)
- The importance of focusing on context
- How Jason drives his team to be business partners, and not report generators
“You realize that small quick wins are very effective because, at its core, it’s really important to get executive buy-in.”
“I’m a huge fan of simplicity. As analytics pros, we could very easily make very complex, very intricate models, and just, ‘Oh, look at how smart we are.’ It doesn’t help our customers. …we only use about two or three different visual types and we use mostly the exact same visual set-up. I can train a sales rep for probably five minutes on all of our reporting because if you understand one, you’re going to understand everything. That gets to the theme again of just simplicity. Don’t over complicate, keep it simple, keep it clean.”
“…To get buy-in, you really got to have your business case, even to your internal customers, really dialed in. If you just bring them a bunch of crap, that’s how you’re going to lose credibility. They’re going to be like, “I don’t have the time to waste with you,” even though we’re trying to be helpful.”
“What my team and I do is we really help companies weaponize their data assets.”