StraightTalk with Mark Jackmore

Jeff Cross: When you need tailored Data Insights and analytics to drive business growth and optimize decision making for your company, what do you do? Well, you start looking for a partner that can give you what you want and what you need. What if I told you there’s one innovative and forward-thinking company that leverages more than 300 business to business data leads and handles billions in monthly transactions? You’d want to know who that is and you would like to have an introduction. So let’s do that! I’m pleased to introduce to you Mark Jackmore, the CEO of Precision Corporation. Mark, welcome. Great to have you today.

Mark Jackmore: Thanks for having me, Jeff. 

Jeff: Let’s get to know you a little bit and your company. So tell us about Mark and tell us about Precision. 

Mark: My name is Mark Jackmore. I’m the CEO of Precision. I have spent my career in the B2B space, specifically in sales and marketing leadership roles for Kimberly Clark, Georgia Pacific, and Newell Brands. I did do a small stint on the consumer side of things running the Walmart team for Newell Brands.

Precision is a data science company that looks to drive value and action from data. We were founded in 2000 on the premise that many large companies have tremendous amounts of data but struggle to manipulate it to drive good business decision making. 

Jeff: Nice background. Let’s talk about Precision’s core mission. Obviously we can look at what you do on your website. But what really matters to Precision as far as the mission statement. 

Mark: Well, the mission statement, Jeff, is transforming data into value and action. And that can take many forms – it can be taking a partner’s data and helping them, as I said earlier, make good decisions based on actual data that they have and that they may be struggling to manipulate. But it can also be taking external data to inform partners of what’s going on in the marketplace writ large. Whether it’s growing or not by verticals, by channels, what their share is, how private label is performing in a given market. So there’s this whole idea of this large data set that we have access to that could help aggregate market sizing and growth trends. And then also our internal partner data that we can help them, again, manipulate to make good decisions.

Jeff: Now Mark, you’re an industry professional. You know your competition. What sets you apart when you look at Precision and others who do what you do when you look at that.

Mark: On the market sizing and share and growth side, many companies in the B2B space use a surveying technique, which can work. So they reach out to maybe a hundred kind of key people in the industry and try to start understanding their opinions of market size and growth. Precision, conversely, builds our market size and growth models based on foundational transactional data, so in, for instance, the cleaning and hygiene space, we have over 50% of all transactional data that occurs in that space. So it really allows us to take a more forensic or data approach to market sizing and growth. On the data consulting side of our business where we help companies make better decisions based on their data, I think what sets us apart there, Jeff, is that we actually have a deep understanding of the B2B space. We only specialize there and specifically across four to six channels – those being cleaning and hygiene or JanSan, the office channel, the industrial Channel, Med Surg, Food Service (specifically on the Disposable side), lastly, we do a bit of work in Industrial Packaging. But because we’re so focused in those areas, we actually understand many of the nuances that other data consulting companies might not readily understand.

Jeff: Fantastic! Let’s talk about pain points, because obviously a company like yours wants to solve the pain points that its clients have. What have you identified as some of the big ones that you address?

Mark: Many clients or partners come to us with hypotheses. So they think a market is growing or they’re about to make a big investment into, say, Healthcare – they believe the healthcare market’s growing and they want to hire certain marketing and sales resources to penetrate that market. But ultimately they may not be factually aware that the market is growing or not. They have a hypothesis that it is, and we can help them prove that. So that could be a pain point when you’re trying to gain funding for a specific initiative but you don’t have the data or the facts to back up materially why you want to engage in a certain strategic initiative.

Jeff: Oh that’s impactful for sure! Thank you for that. Let’s talk about something else. What are the eye opening moments a company often experiences when they embrace the technology that you offer? You must hear about this.

Mark: Yeah, so there are certain Eureka moments that partners have. You know, many times partners come to us with hypotheses that are true but at times aren’t factually supported. And it’s an interesting conversation because there’s a great dialogue that goes on, and you know, many times at Precision we have to just say we understand your hypothesis and unfortunately the data doesn’t support it. But in many cases it does. So there are sometimes Eureka moments around that. Other situations will be something like where, you know, with the growth in e-commerce that’s been going on in the B2B channels, many B2B suppliers and distributors have highly elevated pricing. And then that pricing is typically lowered through contract pricing or customer specific pricing. But to be competitive with small- and medium-sized businesses online, you need the right price online. So customers will want to lower their prices to be more credible online but don’t want to give up gross margin, and that is a very difficult project to embark upon. But there are certain models that can be run, like Category Role, that can afford the lowering of pricing to be credible but the elevation of pricing in other areas where companies can get away with it – where it’s more of a convenience purchase rather than a routine purchase. And we can help identify category sets to enable credible pricing without margin degradation.

Jeff: What about a specific success story where Precision’s analytics significantly impacted a business? Do you have anything there to share? 

Mark: Sure. There was a large company in the cleaning and hygiene space that was going through successive price increases due to inflation over the last few years. The distributors that they were dealing with were pushing back on the increases saying, you know, you can’t keep taking these increases to us because you’re elevating your price in the market to a non-competitive level. This supplier had a hypothesis that suggested that, yes, while I am elevating my price to deal with inflation, I feel like I’m giving back a lot of that price in the form of customer-specific or contract pricing, but I can’t manipulate my data to figure out if that’s true or not. So we were able to develop a portal for this customer that they could take any distributor and assess, yes, they’ve taken 6 or 7 percent in price each year for the last 3 years, but in actuality, when you net the additional contract pricing that was afforded for new business, that price increase wasn’t nearly as high as the distributor thought it was. So they were able to push through their in to stock, or their list price increase, not easily but with data to support why it makes sense. And in that example, that year that supplier realized $7 million more in price during that last price increase where they had the data to support them than they had in prior increases.

Jeff: Good example. Yes, you know, Mark, a company may be doing well as is, it could say it’s successful. What would you tell them if they hesitated to embrace an analytics company like Precision? 

Mark: Well, I would say that however they want to make their business decisions is absolutely fine. And there are many smart people that have great gut instinct on what the right things to do are in this business. That said, with the rise of Gen Z and the Millennials, the decision makers tend to be more data focused than maybe previous Generations like me from Generation X. And backing up a strategic decision that may require significant investment with data that supports the investment be at capex or in SG&A, I think makes all the sense in the world. I mean, if you invest a little bit upfront understanding the market and understand that yes, this business investment does make sense, I think your likelihood of success in that initiative would be much greater.

Jeff: Can you share something about a company like yours that most of us would not know about but is interesting? Like how much electricity do you use? No, just kidding! 

Mark: You know, at Precision we really value our partners first – our employees, our staff and our partners first. And we approach the market with our core values, and our number one value at Precision is Humility. So we’re never going to pretend like we know your business better than you do. We certainly do not. Now we may be very good at data science and helping you make better decisions based on data, but you really have to take those decisions and bring them to market with your deep understanding of your business’s channels and verticals you serve. So the humility of bringing forth insights and ideas with a very deep understanding that, hey, we’re not suggesting that we know your business better than you do, but we are suggesting this is what the data states. So we really take that approach. You know, Quality and Accuracy are really important to Precision. Curiosity, so we ask a lot of questions so that we can deliver the scope and the insights you’re truly looking for. So much gets missed in the scoping of an engagement. You have to be really careful there. So we’re curious, and we ask a lot of questions to ensure that you get what you’re looking for from Precision.

Jeff: I like that, because I don’t know your industry like you do, but it just seems when you have information, when you know something others don’t, you could take on an attitude that we are the authority. But I like how you just work with your clients, provide them the data and science that they need, let them decide. 

Mark: Yeah, as well as qualitative insights. So many of our partners will ask, ‘hey what are you seeing across the industry? Can you provide us with it?’ It might not be scoped in an agreement we have with a partner, but if they’re asking for that, we’ll let them know, ‘hey, here are some other things that we are seeing that aren’t in the scoping of your agreement, but things that might be material to you to think about.’ So we do offer qualitative insights based on our contacts throughout the industry and our multiple engagements. 

Jeff: Information is power, that’s for sure. Now you talked about your partners and you talked about your people, but let’s focus in on your people – your workers, your team. Talk about them. How did you build a good team at Precision and so everything gets done exactly as you described. Brag about your team.

Mark: Yeah, okay, they’re easy to brag about. We typically hire out of college, specifically STEM oriented people. Most of the time mathematics backgrounds, statistics backgrounds, economics sometimes, and then even into the more deeper engineering fields. Our entire analyst team, which is really the engine of Precision – those that build the models that map and validate the data and build the outputs that we deliver to our partners. Every single person on that team was hired directly out of college, so they have been brought up in Precision, in a way. And they are delivering on our values and our mission and vision to our partners, because we consider that our brand. It’s really important that they are steep in our brand and about 85 to 90 percent of our employee population are our teammates who live in that modeling team, that analyst and modeling team. So that’s where most of our cost is. And they are trained extremely well on, not only data modeling and statistics, but also on the industries that we serve. We’re careful not to put them in too much of a client facing position until they’re ready, until they’ve had years of experience building models and shadowing calls and really develop that kind of intuition around these B2B channels that we’re all in each and every day.

Jeff: Well those were good words about your team and whole level of expertise I just can’t imagine that you have there. But I’m glad you’re finding the right people. We talked about your company. We talked about what you do, the pain points you handle for your clients. I guess we need to know what’s next for Precision. What’s the future look like?

Mark: The future of Precision is to continue serving our partners the way we serve them today, and hopefully grow our engagements and our relationships with them. We’re a global company at Precision, so we don’t just service North America. We do service Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia Pacific, as well as Eurasia. Expansion in those markets continues to happen, so we’re growing those markets fairly significantly. So we’ll continue down that road without losing focus on our critical North American partners and businesses.

Jeff: So I guess to wrap up, any parting words of advice? Or maybe you can share as well how people can contact you to learn more or maybe engage in your services.

Mark: Try to utilize data to make decisions, at least foundational data. Understand market sizing and market growth trends by categories, by verticals, geographies, and channels. Understanding that kind of base foundational data of your market is really going to help you decide where to thrust from a growth perspective in the future. I always tell my teammates at Precision, it’s okay to raise your hands and say ‘I need help.’ It took me a long time when I worked in previous sales and marketing leadership roles to raise my hand. I always thought that I should have all the answers myself, and that’s what they hired me for, and it took me a while to realize that it’s okay to ask for help. And I think Precision can certainly be a company that can partner with you and potentially help you in making better decisions. You can reach Precision at PrecisionMarketData.com or contact me at mjackmore@precisionmarketdata.com or any of our associates.