Intuition is no longer enough to make major decisions that shift a company's trajectory. Instead, decision-makers must wield the power of data analytics to make informed decisions for positive long-term results. However, this presents a new challenge: translating a mountain of data into valuable insights and actionable plans.
This is where experts like Nuoya Li stand out. With leadership experience in Fortune 500 companies, Nuoya has prototyped and implemented innovative solutions powered by advanced AI models and data analytics. In this article, we'll explore her philosophy for translating data into actionable business strategies, as well as some of her work across multiple organizations.
Nuoya Li: A Leader in Data and Analytics
As an analytics expert, Nuoya Li uses data to craft targeted sales approaches to maximize profitability and empower organizations to achieve sustainable growth.
The best example of her expertise is her time working in the Chief Analytics Office at a global tech giant. At this Fortune 500 company, Nuoya led cross-team projects as a Senior AI product manager to empower sales teams with machine learning model development and deployment.
In an award-winning project, she designed an intelligent client-prospecting solution to help sales reps identify high-priority leads.
As it stood, sellers struggled to centralize all account data in one place, which made it impossible to easily flag or maintain priority accounts without losing visibility of other accounts with potential. There was also limited capability when it came to managing business contacts or using them to build targeted sales cadence tools. Finally, sales teams needed an automated account creation and opportunity routing solution for partners, and managers were limited in their way to manage their digital sellers under one pane of glass holistically.
To this end, Nuoya set out to create an intelligent, automated prospect list creation tool that leveraged AI to present an integrated 360-degree view. Her primary goal was to analyze existing and potential clients, incorporate data like revenue and company size, and prioritize account lists for easy seller use.
Powered by her data-savvy nature, she worked tirelessly on everything from the front-end user experience to the back-end data integration to develop a prototype. The tool incorporated four machine learning models across two different analytics organizations, more than 15 data sources (including territory views, account data, and contact information), and over 40 filters that made sorting and prioritization much easier for sellers.
Her relentless pursuit to create a refined seller experience was recognized and lauded by company senior executives, and the tool was seamlessly integrated into the company's new CRM system. It was adopted by all organizational sellers and became an essential resource that impacted millions of sales, with salespeople calling it a dream come true.
Thanks to Nuoya's significant contributions, she was placed in charge of guiding other analytics teams to incorporate various AI assets into the company's new CRM. She was also offered to lead the analytics and data science team at the company's Digitalization Sales Hub.
Making Data Actionable: From Insights to Implementation
"Where models and numbers meet change management," Nuoya said at her intern presentation back in the summer of 2018.
The secret to Nuoya's success is her ability to combine quantitative analysis with creativity. Her passion for the arts helps her craft compelling narratives that resonate with her audience. By leveraging the use of clear, impressive visuals, she's able to make analytics more relatable—helping stakeholders and decision-makers better grasp the meaning of each dataset and how it can inform data-driven solutions.
So, what does the process look like? How do you take data and turn it into actionable insights that fuel business growth?
More than anything else, Nuoya believes that you can bridge the gap between raw data and meaningful actions by clearly defining your objectives and harnessing the art of storytelling.
Clear objectives serve as a roadmap, guiding efforts toward answering specific questions. For example, instead of a generic goal like "understand customer behavior," data professionals should aim for a concrete objective like "identify the top three factors influencing customer churn within the last quarter." By clearly defining the goal, you prevent wasting time and resources.
Storytelling, on the other hand, is what helps put data in motion. It transcends simple summaries, focusing instead on developing a compelling narrative that inspires action. To this end, Nuoya presents her data in a way that allows her audience to not just simply see the information she's showing, but rather feel the impact and understand why it's significant.
Improving Digital Sales for a Fortune 500
Nuoya's ability to marry analytics with storytelling is perhaps best demonstrated by her work with the previously mentioned tech giant's Digitalization Sales Hub. It was this team's mission to bring the company's digitalization and automation capabilities to the next level and surpass its competition. To do so, it relied on creating end-to-end customer journeys in order to drive sales across the company's portfolio.
Nuoya's role was to empower this team with actionable data and insights, making sweeping recommendations on organizational investments and initiatives and ensuring that the company was developing a modern and effective digital sales approach.
Such an undertaking is impossible without a concrete understanding of storytelling with data. That's why Nuoya relied on her storied experience to deliver robust visualizations that told a clear story to stakeholders and business leaders. In her work, she improved data automation to make various processes more efficient, captured missing data points to tell a holistic story better, and followed data standards and organizational consistency for posterity and success.
Improving HR Workflows for a Leading US Airline
Nuoya's work has earned her significant internal praise, but it's also given her the opportunity to work in various settings and industries—including work for a leading US airline.
In this setting, she and her team identified several critical challenges and gaps in the human resources department. Namely, they discovered that the airline used vague and general job descriptions, highly impersonal training material, non-existent compensation for employees training outside of their immediate job duties, and a systemic lack of guidance and mentorship throughout the organization.
Nuoya turned her preliminary analysis into a compelling narrative, proposing a collaborative human-AI model to improve the airline's HR operations. If incorporated, her suggested solution would:
- Manage skills mapping with AI, reducing management costs and the complexity of maintaining correct mappings.
- Align skills with learning opportunities, empowering employees by giving them personalized recommendations.
- Develop custom career journeys and tailored learning paths for each employee, reducing bias in career and talent development decision-making.
- Provide visibility into the ambitions and development of employees, making managers' jobs more efficient by reducing administration work.
Through this proof of concept, she highlighted the airline's potential to save millions, reduce processing times by 30%, improve training quality by 26%, and shorten the process of generating one job description to less than a minute. Recognizing the merits of Nuoya's proposal, the airline approved it, estimating that the product would help achieve the goal of filling 25% of its corporate and management openings with existing talent currently in front-line roles.
This holistic approach fosters a culture where data is not just collected but actively used to bring about positive changes. Nuoya believes that organizations that embrace this data-driven culture can unlock the true potential of data, leading to smarter decisions and a competitive edge.
Leveraging Insights in Your Business
Data-driven strategies are no longer optional for business success; they're the fuel for exponential growth. By properly leveraging data with experts like Nuoya Li—who now runs her own technology consulting firm at Forest Friends Innovation Studio—you can unlock actionable insights, optimize business operations, build high-quality technology solutions, and stay ahead of the curve.
