FLUVANNA, NY - As covered in our initial report, hands-on experience creating and executing business strategies in the data insights field is rare. Since this is the bedrock of Perimeter Insights’ business strategy, I had the opportunity to learn more about how Co-Founders Eric LeBlanc and Adam Brohimer bring this to the table.
“The greatest impact on my approach was a face-to-face year-end wrap-up discussion with a client who said to me, ‘You didn’t give me what I wanted this year,’” Adam shared. He proceeded to tell me how he was opening up the contract to review all the deliverables when the client said that he knew he’d received everything promised, not what he really needed.
“I was relatively young in my career at that point, so it took me a few years to go from thinking he was crazy to realizing he was right! Asking questions, getting beyond the obvious, understanding context and strategy, not selling a product or checking off boxes in a contract, is critical to a successful relationship and value delivery,” Adam reflected. “That interaction is burned into my memory for life. For Perimeter Insights, when we say we are thinking about your business and that fresh deserves better, it is a lifestyle, not a slogan.”
Adam has seen the world through decades of data analysis and consulting, while Eric has seen the world through decades of budget management to identify the best ROI from a supplier's perspective.
“Fresh college graduates who are talented in quant can’t deliver the necessary perspective. Researchers who have never been practitioners can seldom deliver it. We wanted our new company to bridge that gap, and bridging that gap means we only ever aspire to be a boutique firm delivering senior founder experience to a limited number of clients,” Eric explained. “We see ourselves as craftsmen in a world that focuses on scale.”
As an executive with a large supplier organization, Eric experienced how purchased or commissioned new consumer research would lack the context and nuance to be applicable or useful enough to match the investment.
“This was not because the researchers weren’t good at their job, they simply lacked the business context in most cases to provide compelling insights from the study,” Eric observed. “The gap between what the data said and how to convert that data into insights can seldom be bridged by an analyst.”
To extract value from the study, Eric explained that someone in the business—usually him—had to digest the data, devote the time and bandwidth to create the connections that transform it into information and, ultimately, insights.
Over time, Eric learned to rely heavily on a few research suppliers that had accumulated business context knowledge, making the creation, execution, and reporting of research studies more valuable from a business strategy perspective.
“From both our perspectives, we have seen that insights as a function have not been wedded tightly enough to business strategy. We believe that if Perimeter Insights is going to deliver ROI—and it must—then it must arise from the context of what it is that the business is trying to accomplish,” Eric shared.
When I ask how that translates to a process, Eric said the right sequence goes something like this:
- What increased sales are desired, and will that incremental volume come from additional distribution, higher velocity, or both?
- What information do retailers need to take on more distribution?
- What communications and programs need to be put into place to drive more consumption—more users, higher frequency, or both?
“A supplier may buy subscriptions to get the answers to these questions, but they’re not buying a platform—they’re buying the chance to put themselves in a position to score,” Eric elaborated. “To use an example from the movie Moneyball, we were making the mistake of thinking we were buying data assets or capabilities. What we were really buying is increased sales and transformed retailer relationships.”
Eric and Adam carefully laid out several pillars for the company to follow: Actionable Insights; Business Context; Financial Impact; Solution-Focused; Reject Conventional Wisdom; and The Final Mile.
Each clearly illustrates a point Eric made in the catalyst to the company’s launch: industry members being told they would receive insights, not data; yet, everyone Eric accounted for received data far more often than insights.
“To have paid for insights that sit on a shelf is a terrible feeling. We won’t be a party to that,” he said. “To offer glib assessments and superficial recommendations is malpractice. Imagine telling an industry that their only path to growth is to cut price. Livelihoods are on the line. Legacies, even. When we make recommendations, we understand that careers and families may be on the line. People depend on us to get it right, and we take that extremely seriously.”
With decades of business experience in how data is used by suppliers to increase the business and relationship value for their retailers, the Co-Founders of Perimeter Insights ensure ROI not with words, but with inside knowledge built by senior people with founder energy.
