Meaghan was recently interviewed on Lena Elkin’s podcast, Unfiltered.

Check out the full episode below along with our insights on the most important points.

How did Meaghan get her start?

Meaghan grew up in a home that was not entrepreneurial at all. No one in her family had ever gone to college, so she was taught that management was the goal. If you could reach management, you had arrived.

She had her first taste of entrepreneurship in college selling encyclopedias door to door. This experience allowed her to become her own boss and manager her own “company”. This opened her eyes to how her own individual contributions affected her income. Through this experience, she learned the value of being 100% responsible for herself and her outcomes.

After that, she became a sales consultant, but still under an organization. During this time, she met AJ.  AJ is an entrepreneur through and through. He started creating companies at age 10, so he opened her eyes to the possibilities of entrepreneurship.

One of the biggest transitions that she had to make was to shift her mindset from individual contributor to growing a company.

Luckily, her journey with data started much earlier.

Meaghan was the math nerd from an early age. She jokes that she had more math books than friends. Meaghan loved math and numbers because everything had a correct response. Everything was either right or wrong, and it was clear why.

She had planned to become a math teacher, but upon discovering her gift for sales, she decided to focus on hustling while she could and teach later in life.

The sales bottleneck

In all of Meaghan’s sales experience, she relied on her inputs to create outputs. She either knocked doors to get sales, or she cold-called businesses to get sales. Enter AJ.

AJ worked in marketing, and Meaghan wanted to learn more about what that meant. So she shadowed him working on a client. The client had set up a course that he wanted to sell, so AJ set up a sales funnel and landing pages, and then sent out an email to his list. They had 500,000 on that list, so they sat back and waited to see the responses. Within 8 hours, the campaign had cleared $1.2 million.

Upon seeing this, Meaghan knew that she needed to make the jump from sales to marketing. Because of her background in sales, she helped with copy and closing clients. Upon spending some time in the agency, she began to notice patterns in the data.

In her time working in sales, she would split test approaches and different scripts. Over time, she perfected her sales pitch. Upon making the switch to marketing, she realized that they did the exact same thing, just on a larger scale, and with more automation.

The marketing bottleneck

While running the agency with AJ, they had to report back to their clients on the progress of their campaigns. So they had a marketer who had to run reports for clients all day, every day. He wasn’t able to do anything else because they had to get this data to their clients.

So Meaghan started researching ways to automate their reporting. She found the solution in the world of data analytics and business intelligence. She found that many of these programs could automatically do what they had someone doing by hand. The programs could extract the data from all of the different sources, aggregate it, and even display it in an easy to interpret format.

Once they rolled out these reporting solutions to their clients, they naturally wanted more. They wanted more information on their business and wanted that same powerful reporting for everything. Ultimately, everything that Meaghan worked on led her down the path to Praxis.

AJ and Meaghan pivoted their marketing agency into a data analytics agency, and now help business owners and marketers understand their businesses better through data.

How to take advantage of your data

The first thing that you need to do to truly take advantage of your data is set your ego and emotions aside. As Meaghan talked about earlier, numbers allow you to see in black and white. Rather than focusing on how they make you feel, you can use that information to help you grow forward and progress.

ETL

The next thing that you need to do in order to truly take advantage of your data is a process called “ETL”. ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. Essentially, you need to extract raw data from the back ends of your systems, then transform it to make sure that it accurately reflects what you want to measure, and then load it into a business intelligence or visualization tool.

Get help

Lots of solopreneurs and early stage entrepreneurs end up needing to learn sales and marketing in order to get their company off the ground. Learning data as well would likely push anyone over the edge.

That’s a big reason why Praxis shifted down-market. We used to work with larger companies, but we found that they needed answers to the same questions that the little guys did. Everyone wanted to know what worked, what didn’t work, where to spend more money, and where to cut spending in order to better optimize.

The best time to start thinking about integrating a BI or dashboarding tool is after you’ve already hit $250,000 in revenue. For businesses pre-$250,000 it’s best to focus on tracking. Too many businesses wait until they get big in order to worry about their data; but you can’t leverage data that you don’t have. Every business needs to set up tracking, and the earlier you set it up, the better.

Most businesses spend all of their time worrying about their copy and their look and feel, but they neglect their tracking. Google Analytics is one of the most underutilized and error-prone tools on the market.

We see lots of big companies that come to us with very little or no data available to them, looking for answers to their business questions, but they don’t have any data. We have to take them back to the beginning and help them set up their tracking, and then we can help them analyze the data as it comes in.

Data is sexy.

Lots of people view data as something that happened in the past, and therefore not something that can help them in their current situation; however, the true power of data is that it can help you see the patterns in the past, and then predict and shape the future.

As we covered earlier, it’s very important to get started as early as possible with this process. So now we want to cover how you can get started:

UTMs

UTMs are a free tool that every business can and should use for all of their marketing. UTMs allow you to pass information through URLs in order to better track where your traffic comes from. Adding UTMs to your external links allows you to understand how your customers found you and what content they interacted with.

UTMs allow you to see much cleaner, more granular data about the performance of your marketing efforts. This allows you to get better insights, allowing you to decrease waste and double down on what works.

If you want to learn more about UTMs, we have a course that walks through how to build them and gives you tools to help you automate the creation of your UTMs. Here is the link to that course.

If you need help with more of the advanced data issues that they discussed, check out our business intelligence tools and dashboards.

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