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Once you've got metrics, you can get into benchmarks. It's obvious that you should compare yourself to competitors in your vertical, but how do you compare to non-competitors that have the same business model?
This isn't to tell you where you should be, per se, more of a way of understanding how other businesses use these metrics to measure their strategy. To make this a little more concrete, let's compare two hypothetical businesses.
Company A sells a subscription box for hiking snacks called GORPorate. Company B is a productivity suite called SrsBsnss. Both are fundamentally based around subscriptions, and as a result, both care about conversions and churn, as well as customer acquisition costs.
GORPorate is direct-to-consumer (DTC) and SrsBsnss exclusively relies on enterprise clients, meaning their margins per customer are vastly different. As a result, each company will place more importance on conversion and churn.
This will of course depend on where their businesses are at, but you'd generally expect GORPorate to focus more on conversions, generating revenue through volume. If customers churn, it's not that big of a deal because getting someone to pay for a $30 box of snacks is fairly easy
On the other hand, SrsBsnss depends on huge corporate contracts. Maybe they only have a dozen or so customers who provide all their revenue. This means losing one customer could be catastrophic, and as a result they worry more about churn.
Unsurprisingly this also means that SrsBsnss is willing to spend a lot more money on their customers than GORPorate so they'll tolerate higher customer acquisition costs. A couple expensive dinners with prospective clients is worth it if it lands you a reliable long term contract
SrsBsnss's tolerance for higher CAC and focus on controlling churn may also lead them to build more customer-specific features or programs into their business. GORPorate might offer flash sales or discounts to certain customer segments, but more than that is probably a bad idea
These are fundamentally similar tactics--giving the customer who provides consistent payment more value for the same price--and they're both likely to be implemented to reduce churn. Similar metrics, wildly different strategies for moving them.
At any rate, keeping business models top of mind will change your game as a DS. It keeps you grounded and focused on using your specialized DS skills on delivering value for your company, and business people like working with people who seem like they get it.
If you're looking for a free resource, this article is a great starting place. Invest some time in reading through the resources linked therein, and you'll have a great framework for that domain expertise that's so underrated.https://towardsdatascience.com/10-reads-for-data-scientists-getting-started-with-business-models-78e6a224fd66 …
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