Be data-driven
More and more companies these days are learning that they need to make DATA-DRIVEN decisions.
With big data and data science on the rise, we have more data than we know what to do with.
One of the basic languages of data analytics is SQL, which is used for many popular databases including MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and even big data solutions like Hive and Cassandra.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most high-level marketers and product managers at big tech companies know how to manipulate data to gain important insights. No longer do you have to wait around the entire day for some software engineer to answer your questions - now you can find the answers directly, by yourself, using SQL!
Your existing solutions are inefficient
Are you tired of depending on crufty “analytics” software? Do you have to ask an engineer to help you whenever you have a question about the data?
This is not ideal and won’t help you do your job efficiently.
SQL, short for “structured query language”, is a language that can be used for all kinds of databases - from the tiny databases stored in your iPhone, to large big data databases that span multiple continents.
Engineers have done a great job of creating these different types of complex data stores, while still allowing you to use the same language, more or less, for all of them.
What does that mean for you?
It means as long as you know SQL, you can take advantage of ALL of this software, and gain insights into this data, no matter what kind of database it is stored in, as long as it supports SQL.
You can ask questions like:
- How many people are falling into each stage of the sales funnel?
- What is my year over year profit?
- Are there any differences in the demographics between the people who are buying product X and product Y?
- What is our most profitable month?
- What are the seasonal trends in our industry?
I’m an engineer, so I probably haven’t even thought of all the questions you’ve already had for years! But I guarantee you, knowing SQL will help you answer these questions.
On various teams I’ve worked on in the tech world - I’ve noticed that marketing people and product managers have SQL skills and sometimes even coding skills! So if you are looking to not only make your day more productive, but make yourself more marketable to employers and catch up to the other go-getters in your field - then you should most definitely learn SQL.
The takeaway
Do you want to know how to optimize your sales funnel using SQL, look at the seasonal trends in your industry, and run a SQL query on Hadoop? Then join me now in my new book, SQL for marketers: Dominate data analytics, data science, and big data.
