Odds are that you invest a lot of time & people (or money on strategy consultants) to dig into historical datasets, in order to craft a great strategy. Nothing wrong with defining where to put your money & effort in the coming years based on objective figures you say? No it’s not. But what happens a lot in reality is that these figures are more used to ‘prove’ that the strategy that already has been chosen is the right one. And then there is the main question: do you really believe that the past is a good reference for the future (your +3 year plan) ? Forget about innovation when you go for this approach!

On the other hand, when companies shift to the delivery part, they seem to forget that here customer behaviour is a good proxy for new customer behaviour. This is due to the fact that all other variable are much more stable because they occur at the same time: You offer the same products, your customer base operates under the same economical conditions, your competition base is constant,…

So stop over-proving your strategy with analysis and put your bright data-analysts & managers on customer data analysis for ‘run’ purposes.
Nice extra : these effort will start having an impact on your bottom line today, instead of in 3 year.