I was at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce last week for a meeting.

It was a great meeting and I met some awesome people.

Along the way I had a couple of great conversations with Kathryn Williams and Arica Netterville among many others.

So many people helping other people along their business journeys — it was inspiring to say the least.

I didn’t think of it at the time or I would have gotten photos with people.

Next time friends, next time.

I wanted to talk about a story I heard there though.

One of not just disconnected, siloed data… but also of not even collecting the data available to us.

Because this situation is rampant.

That is not to say that anyone is doing it wrong… per se.

I wouldn’t recommend that you do this though.

And here’s the rub… this data collection and analysis is a friggin pain in the tuchus.

I know. The first RevOps data pipeline I build looked something like Frankenstein’s monster.

An example…

Clickfunnels wanted (not sure if they still do) you to upgrade your account to connect the data to HubSpot.

They didn’t charge you to connect a Zap.

Zapier wanted to charge you for HubSpot but not for Google Sheets.

So you create a system where a new contact entered their information and they went to Google Sheets immediately.

Then you wrote a piece of code that the Google Sheet used to insert that contact into HubSpot.

Janky — oh yeah.

Did it work — yep 100% of the time.

Until something changes.

And then you are in what I call distributed system bug land.

Which part failed?

Why?

And how do you know?

And how will you know next time it happens so you don’t have to spend the next 8, 16, 40 work hours solving a problem that your non-technical team doesn’t specialize in?

So how to make this work?

If we start with a vision of what we want…

Unified, understandable customer data — as an example —

We can architect around that central concept to accomplish a much better mechanism that we can iterate on and improve over time while working on our customer data goals on a consistent and constant basis.

It requires the vision though.

Without that a customer data strategy is nothing.

So what vision do you have for your customer data? Let me know in the comments!

And don’t come at me with 100% retention… because no one believes that.