Amazon Accelerate and the one-hour delivery future
Brian was in Seattle at Amazon Accelerate, their annual seller conference with 5,000 attendees and thousands more online. The big B2B announcement was that Amazon is now allowing advertising specifically designed to reach business customers, something they had not permitted before. Brian also highlighted Amazon’s continued push on logistics: one-hour drone delivery is coming to key markets by the end of the year. The gap between science fiction and reality keeps shrinking.
They continue to push the bar. They do things that are counter to their own core business. They are enabling other off-Amazon transactions to occur, which is counterintuitive, but they believe it is better for customers.
Brian Beck, Master B2B
Traditional dashboards miss the full story
Brian showed a typical Google Analytics dashboard: visits, page views, conversion rate, revenue, bounce rate. These metrics are useful for understanding what happens on the website, but they miss the offline transactions that digital influences. BCG research shows that two-thirds of B2B purchases are influenced by digital even when the transaction happens offline. If analytics only measure online conversions, they undercount digital’s true impact.
Three levels of analytics maturity
Andy summarized a Harvard Business Review framework. Descriptive analytics tells you what happened, like a weather report saying it rained yesterday. Predictive analytics tells you what will happen, like a forecast of rain in three days. Prescriptive analytics tells you what to do about it, including when, where, and how much. The prescriptive level is the goal, but it requires a strong data foundation and, critically, alignment between business goals and what the analytics team measures.
Alignment matters more than maturity
Andy shared research on how alignment affects analytics outcomes. Companies that are both aligned internally and digitally mature see analytics produce a multiplier effect on growth and financial KPIs. But companies that are digitally mature yet misaligned see analytics underperform, sometimes with negative effects. If the C-suite is thinking one thing and the analytics team is measuring another, the data does not translate into results.
If they are not intellectually honest about what their business is doing from a digital perspective, the analytics are going to be off because the analytics do not reflect the business.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
The challenge of too much data
Mark Vasquez from Ideal Clamp Products raised a different problem in the comments: a proliferation of data and changing KPIs. Companies may not realize they are tracking the wrong things until they have been doing it for too long, and the dashboard becomes a mile long. Brian noted that Gartner surveys showed analytics priorities shifted dramatically between 2018 and 2022, from internal metrics to external ones. Analytics reflects business strategy, and when strategy shifts, the metrics lag behind.
What Amazon teaches about data culture
Brian connected the discussion to Amazon’s culture. At the conference, Doug Harrington, CEO of Amazon Retail, talked about how Amazon uses AI for predictive analytics. But what stood out was Amazon’s insistence that data be viewed objectively. Teams compete internally because optimizing for one group can hurt another. Someone has to make a decision, and the data wins. This intellectual honesty is what makes analytics actionable.
Analytics is the number one priority for 2025
At the New York round table, participants were asked to rank their top priorities for 2025. The number one answer was analytics, ahead of customer experience. A former Amazon data scientist at the event noted that only about 12% of tests produce actionable results. The other 88% tell you nothing. Testing is still valuable, but expectations should be calibrated.
Most companies lack the data they need
A LinkedIn poll asked whether practitioners have enough information on their analytics dashboards to make actionable decisions. The results: 56% said not enough, 22% said too much, and only 22% said just the right amount. The foundation is still the hardest part: getting the right data into one place so it can be analyzed. That challenge will define the analytics agenda for 2025.