4 Reasons Why Analytics Are Crucial for Investment Bankers

If you aren’t paying careful attention to your analytics, you’re letting your business down. Data plays an important role in everything we do today. Knowing how to use it is only to your advantage. It saves you time, it answers questions without your having to ask them, and it adds tremendous value to any transaction.

So, you ask, what can I do with analytics?

1) Analytics Allow You to Accurately Measure & Track Data

Analytics are what we used to call Big Data, Sentiment Indicators, or Technical Analysis, something that traders have been using for decades. Today, it’s a common MarTech (Marketing Technology) tool and can be found on every platform, such as Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, etc. Companies provide these tools to eCommerce or digital groups because they are designed to help them sell more. However, they can only do so much, because it requires users to understand the purpose of their data.

Analytical data tells you a story of your customer’s behavior. For an investment banker, this data can come from a data room, email open rates, or link clicks. This is the beginning of what technology groups call the Customer Journey. This data is invaluable because it is first-party data: data collected on your content. It answers many questions before having to ask a client.

2) Allows You to Better Understand Your Digital Visitors, Prospects, and Customers

I have had many prospects tell me that they loved my presentation or that they thoroughly went through the entire data room. However, the data tells me they spent 10 seconds on the presentation — probably scanned through the pictures, not absorbing the content. This information is invaluable because it takes away the guessing of what I need to discuss with the individual or group.

Imagine you are negotiating a transaction where your investor or buyer is not giving you the feedback you need. Through analytics, data can be used to focus how you will pitch an investment idea and better guide your discussion. The data is very clear. Knowing how much time people spend on your content tells you a story about their journey through this information.

3) Analytics Help You Optimize for Conversions

Many people do not like to be asked direct questions in the fear of embarrassment or being cornered, so asking them only risks creating distance and making your customer not like you.

Take a deal that my team worked on in summer 2020. We had an investor who was plowing through the data room, many page views, a lot of time spent going through the documents thoroughly. However, I noticed very little time spent on one of the most important pages of a cash-flow agreement. Going into the call, I knew this was a point to focus on.
Without asking the question, we were able to go right to a key point in the discussion about the transaction.

Analytics help focus on getting deals done, not on who knows what!

4) Analytics Can Help You Generate New Customers

Analytics are important not only for your proprietary data or enclosed content but also for content that is distributed on the Internet via news articles, blogs, etc. Publishing articles that entice viewers to click tells you what traffic is interesting to the market. If you are a U.S. investment banker focused on the payments space, and you are able to see that a lot of traffic coming from your article is being reshared on a blog in France, this could be data used for your group to find new customer opportunities in Europe.

This is what happened to me in Q3–2020. One of my articles was reposted in the Netherlands, with massive traffic flowing into an article we published. This created a lot of dialogue with new potential customers that I normally would have to contact directly. It was an advantage being able to see the source of the traffic, through the publishing site’s analytics. This allowed me to see what traffic sources drove the most interest to my content.

Final Thoughts

Accurate analytics should be a must-have for all investment bankers. Without hard data that allows you to track online activity in a reliable way, you could be left in the dark and forced to spend a lot of time on the wrong things during your client or investor calls, instead of utilizing actionable data that helps push the story or the deal forward. Data is black and white, it is very clear, using it takes away the guessing. It builds the confidence you need to firmly plan your client calls, investor meetings, and deal closings.