MVD=MVD: Your Minimum Viable Data is your Most Valuable Data

Sure, data is seen as the lifeblood of modern business. Companies are urged to collect as much data as possible, with the belief that more information leads to better insights and decision-making. However, this approach can lead to data overload; executives leave the company but their reports remain running. Products are depreciated but data collection remains. Automations and workflows may be misconfigured and trigger field updates that create a cascade effect on data flow.

Everyone has their pet data. Everyone has a beautiful report that they’ve built or a fantastic dashboard. They’ve persuaded IT to add new fields custom fields to the databases. They have adapted they’ve created automated workflows to sense and update changes on these fields. They run automated dashboards nightly. And then they leave the company, and these things keep flowing.

The Problem of Data Overload

It's easier than ever for businesses to collect vast amounts of data. From website analytics and customer interactions to social media metrics, the sheer volume of information available can be overwhelming. While having a wealth of data might seem advantageous, it often results in complexity and inefficiency. Sifting through terabytes of information to find actionable insights is not only time-consuming but also costly.

Additionally, the more data you gather, the higher your storage and processing costs rise. Managing large datasets increases the risk of privacy violations, especially in an era where regulations like GDPR and CASL hold companies to stricter standards.

From a Revenue Orchestration standpoint, your Minimum Viable Data (MVD) is your Most Valuable Data. MVD=MVD.

Simply, your salespeople know what handful of data points indicate a likely buyer, but organizations move hundreds or thousands of data points. Strip back to very basics. MVD may vary by audience or product, but there’s still only a few key indicators, the rest are less valuable for the ultimate goal; getting prospect to closed-won.

Focusing on MVD lowers data costs as you prioritize data flow. It helps with privacy enforcement as you’re tracking less and makes it easier to comply with GDPR and CASL.

What is Minimum Viable Data (MVD)?

Minimum Viable Data represents a paradigm shift in how businesses approach information collection and usage. The concept is simple: identify the smallest set of data points necessary to achieve your objectives, whether that’s identifying potential buyers, personalizing customer experiences, or optimizing marketing campaigns. MVD is about stripping away the noise and focusing on what truly drives value.

Back to your sales team. While they might have access to hundreds of data points about prospects, only a handful—such as recent purchases, engagement levels, or specific queries—are indicative of buying intent. By zeroing in on these key indicators, businesses can make more informed decisions without getting bogged down by irrelevant information.

For instance, at one company, we found that are most highly-engaged audiences were students. We were delighted at their behavioral scores! They were engaged because they were researching and learning about the basics of typography, but had no intention to buy.

The lowest scoring audiences? The VP who signs the contract. They log in, look at a couple of pages, sign the purchase order.

Our salespeople knew this, our marketers didn’t. They were focused on the wrong MVD.

The lowest scoring audiences? The VP who signs the contract. They log in, look at a couple of pages, sign the purchase order. Our salespeople knew this, our marketers didn’t. They were focused on the wrong MVD.

Benefits of Focusing on MVD

Adopting an MVD approach offers several advantages that directly impact a company’s bottom line and operational efficiency.

• Cost Efficiency: By reducing the amount of data you collect, store, and analyze, organizations can significantly lower their expenses. Data storage and processing are costly, and minimizing unnecessary data reduces these costs. Additionally, streamlining your data collection efforts can lead to more efficient resource allocation across your organization.
• Enhanced Privacy Compliance: Collecting less data inherently reduces the risk of non-compliance with regulations like GDPR and CASL. By focusing on only the most essential information, companies not only protect their customers’ privacy but also mitigate potential legal risks.
• Simplicity and Clarity: MVD promotes simplicity, which can lead to clearer insights and better decision-making. When you’re not overwhelmed by a deluge of data, it’s easier to identify patterns and trends that genuinely impact your business. This clarity allows for more agile responses to market changes and customer needs.

MVD and Revenue Orchestration: How Essential Data Drives Sales

Revenue orchestration—the alignment of sales, marketing, and customer success efforts—relies heavily on data to function effectively. However, the complexity introduced by excessive data can hinder these processes. By focusing on MVD, businesses can ensure that their revenue orchestration efforts are powered by the most relevant and actionable information.

Identifying Your MVD: It’s Not One Size Fits All

While the concept of MVD is universal, its application varies depending on your specific product, audience segmentation, and industry. What constitutes essential data for a SaaS company targeting small businesses might differ significantly from that of an e-commerce retailer catering to individual consumers.

To identify your buyer’s MVD, start by asking fundamental questions:

• What are our key buyer’s objectives? What do they want? What do they look like from a firmagraphic or behavioral standpoint?
• Which data points directly support these objectives? Is it tens of fields, or hundreds? If hundreds, can we aggregate some of this to a roll-up field? Focus on indicators that have a clear correlation with your sales team’s closed-won profiles.
• How can we collect and analyze this information efficiently? How many systems collect this data? Is it in a data lake or other centralized system? Does it require data engineers or can a marketer run these models? Ensure that your data collection processes are streamlined to avoid unnecessary complexity.

How to make this MVD work for you

MVD, like many of my fundamental tenets of good Revenue Orchestration architecture, requires investment in people over technology. Get sales and marketing and content people in a room with your product managers.

It requires active executive participation to ensure that the groups will find concensous and overcome communication behavior patterns in order to have the direct conversations needed. It needs the teams to understand and respect each others’ business goals.

It needs a collaborative environment for the teams to build a catalog of use case experiments that leverage that MVD. Because you need a good data flow, and the right data flowing.

Your Minimum Viable Data is your Most Valuable Data.

Find it. Funnel it.