Getting Started on the Insight Map

Learning Objectives

After completing this topic, you'll be able to:

• Gather insights about your customer's business
• Get inspiration from other insight maps

Use the Insight Map to Optimize Your Business Conversations

Let's look again at Lynn's new Oriole Health & Fitness account.

Oriole Health & Fitness includes chains of health-food and sports equipment stores. The company is expanding quickly and is upgrading its current systems.

From her experience with similar companies, Lynn knows that Oriole Health & Fitness is likely to have problems she can solve with her point-of-sale (POS) hardware, software, and training solutions.

Lynn knows how important it is to make sure every conversation with Oriole Health & Fitness has as much value as possible for both sides.

She and her colleagues will use an insight map to gather their knowledge in a way that helps them understand Oriole Health & Fitness's particular business goals and problems.

The basic building blocks of the insight map are:

• Oriole Health & Fitness's relevant business goals.
• The business pressures affecting their goals.
• The initiatives that Oriole Health & Fitness is undertaking to address these pressures so they can achieve their goals.
• The obstacles that need to be overcome.
• The solutions that will help Oriole Health & Fitness to overcome the obstacles.

Gather the Team's Initial Ideas

First, Lynn and the team need to capture their ideas and knowledge about the Oriole Health & Fitness account.

They won't worry about structuring or correctly categorizing the information for now. The important thing is to get the knowledge they've gathered so far onto the board. Then they'll be able to better organize their information and to build on what they have.

So what have they got for the initial ideas?

They know that Oriole Health & Fitness's business goals for this year are:

• To increase revenue from its pharmacies to $180 million.
• To increase their margin by 3 percent.
• To improve earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) by 5 percent.

From their conversations with key people at Oriole Health & Fitness, they've learned about some of the business issues impacting Oriole Health & Fitness's goals. They quickly capture these in a section they call 'General Notes'.

At this early stage, some cards may be in the wrong place. For example, 'Staff onboarding is too difficult' may be an obstacle caused by something that's broken in the onboarding process.

The team will reword and restructure these later, moving some to other parts of the board. This is all part of the process of building a great insight map.

Here's what the insight map looks like after the team's first pass.

As the team grows their relationships with the people in Oriole Health & Fitness, they'll be able to gather additional knowledge and improve their understanding of the account's goals and problems.

They'll continue to shape and develop the board as their knowledge of the account deepens.

Get Inspiration from Other Insight Maps

Lynn and her colleagues know that sometimes other insight maps can provide inspiration.

This could put them in a position to provide Oriole Health & Fitness with business insights they wouldn't get anywhere else – a great way to boost Riley Retail Solutions's value to them.

Lynn clicks Import in the top right of the insight map to look for other, similar insight maps that may be worth checking out.

She selects the tags ‘Health’ and ‘Medium (101-999)’ to identify insight maps belonging to opportunities of a similar size and nature to Oriole Health & Fitness. Lynn finds a likely candidate in the insight map for an opportunity with Murray Health Foods.

She clicks into the Murray Health Foods insight map. The insights look to be carefully assembled, so she clicks the star icon to add it to her favorites. The map could be helpful for future accounts, and now it will be instantly accessible on the My Favorites tab when she next searches for insight maps to use.

For now, Lynn sees that the Murray Health Foods map has a couple of business pressures that could also be applicable to Oriole Health & Fitness. So she selects the appropriate insight cards and clicks Add to import them onto the Oriole Health & Fitness insight map.

She'll discuss these with some of the key players in Oriole Health & Fitness to find out whether they actually are pressures that affect their goals.

At this point, it's worth recalling the previous section of the course where Lynn created three divisions for the Oriole Health & Fitness account: Food & Nutrition, Health & Wellness and Fitness Centers. She can create insight maps for each of these divisions, and they can be accessed from the map for the Oriole Health & Fitness account.

When Lynn is viewing a division's insight map, she can click the Account button to view the insights on her account map and use drag and drop to apply selected insights to the relevant division.

Shape and Develop the Insight Map

Now that the initial ideas have been captured, Lynn and the team can collaborate with the key players at Oriole Health & Fitness to further develop the insight map.

The detail they add will help them to articulate a clear story about:

• The goals that Oriole Health & Fitness needs to achieve.
• The problems they need to solve.
• The value they will get from an investment in Riley Retail Solutions's solutions.

Try It Yourself

Why not open one of your accounts now and start building the insight map? You can:

• Gather the team's initial ideas
• Get inspiration from other insight maps