Selling Business Intelligence
About This Episode
In this episode, we take a closer look at the concept of revenue leak and why it resonates more than traditional business intelligence (BI) when it comes to helping affiliates and online businesses. The discussion starts with the origins of StatsDrone and the realization that affiliates often lose money because they lack visibility into their data. By reframing the conversation around revenue leak rather than BI, the goal is to make the problem—and solution—more relatable and urgent
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The episode also explores the challenges of selling BI tools in the affiliate industry. While solutions like Tableau or Looker are powerful, many affiliates don’t see the immediate value in “business intelligence.” Instead, the pain point they understand best is lost revenue—campaigns not tracking clicks, affiliate programs not reporting correctly, or data gaps that quietly drain performance. By speaking the language of pain, the idea of revenue leak becomes not just clearer but also more emotional and motivating for action
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Finally, the podcast broadens the scope, suggesting that revenue leak is not just an affiliate issue but a problem across industries such as e-commerce and beyond. With inspiration drawn from shows like Revenue Vitals, the host shares plans to evolve the podcast, bring in new guests, and open up conversations about the uncomfortable but necessary truths hidden in data. The aim is to help businesses of all kinds see their revenue clearly, plug the leaks, and unlock untapped potential.
Full Transcript
Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Selling Business Intelligence
Host: John Wright
Published: Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:17:00 +0000
Duration: 5:43
Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.
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John Wright: And welcome to the Philly BI Podcast. You're joining me on a quick little nature hike. So for anyone who's watching the video version, you can see a little bit. And today I'm going to talk a short topic about business intelligence and the idea of selling it. So I'm thinking about changing this podcast from the Philly BI podcast to the Revenue League Podcasts. And I've got a couple of reasons for it. First of all, when it came to building Stadstrom, the idea behind it was primarily just to kind of solve revenue leak for affiliates.
John Wright: I just noticed that affiliates, they weren't really looking at their data. So they couldn't really make data-driven decisions. And there'd be so many ways in which you could lose money as an affiliate. Like, for example, if you had a campaign that just stopped delivering any clicks or the clicks weren't registering with the affiliate program, then you're losing money.
John Wright: Now, if you happen to have back in the day been using a tool like Nifty Stats or Staffs Remote, you'd be at least lucky to have some sort of visibility on your data. But just because you had that visibility doesn't mean it actually would detect these problems for you. So that was part of why I wanted to at least build Stadstrom and say, okay, you know what, let's help solve it so you don't need to look through tables of data to see everything. Now, it goes without saying, like, as soon as you say the word business intelligence, you're like, well, what comes to mind with business intelligence?
John Wright: You get things like Tableau, Power BI, Looker Studio, a lot of data-based tools. And if you start doing analysis, there's a massive amount of money in that whole space. And in some instances, you can basically say that AI is now a subset of it. It's like, well, then what is AI in relation to business intelligence and data analysis and analytics? They kind of all come hand in hand. So and another thing I wanted to say is that while we're trying to go through our journey of getting more users to use Stadstrom, we looked at the TAM, which is the total addressable market, and realized that the market's
John Wright: massive, like how many affiliates are there in the world? There's millions and millions, like Amazon has what, a million affiliates on their own, A-Win with their network, which used to include share of sale before it kind of merged in. That's a million. What's impact.com have? I don't know. I mean, if they're not at a million, it's still a lot. So the affiliates are everywhere, but they're not all using tools to aggregate their data and get the data. So you start with collecting the data and then you process it and then you start adding the BI layers, which are now going to become in some aspects, maybe the AI layers of giving you the automated insights.
John Wright: So I just found that trying to sell a BI solution as BI, it's kind of like, it doesn't speak to people. I mean, they can kind of understand it on a surface level, but when you say business intelligence, I've discovered that a lot of companies that offer BI solutions, they struggle to sell. They struggle to kind of get the message across and the best way of selling it kind of comes through pain. And it's like, well, what's pain? Revenue leak. So it's kind of like, it's not just to say like, you know, we want to call it a different name of a podcast for selling, but we also wanted to make it emotional.
John Wright: And when I thought about revenue leak, I wasn't even thinking about a really famous podcast that I was a big fan of that is no longer hosted by Chris Walker, which is Revenue Vitals. And it's like, well, that's a pretty cool name. What is Revenue Vitals? It's the vitals of your revenue where if you don't solve this, your life is on the line. So that was a pretty emotional name for a podcast. And I think the reason why that podcast was popular wasn't because
John Wright: you know, it wasn't because like, you know, Chris Walker is charismatic. It's because of his content. I mean, if it's called Revenue Vitals and he had shit content, no one would care that he's even revenue vitals in the first place. So yeah, it's like I care about this concept of revenue leak and I just think it's going to resonate with a lot more people. And I think it'll give us permission to kind of go into a couple other spaces outside of affiliate marketing and go, well, what is Revenue leak and e-commerce and different industries and how can we learn from their experiences and bring bring that inward. So let us know what you think about the concept of revenue as the name of the podcast and who knows, I think might
John Wright: be in a do very soon and insightful to talk about the idea that I know a lot of friends that have, you know, this intelligence as services or and for tools seem very very cell services is maybe easier to sell, but it's still a hard sell. I mean, a lot of people kind of going, well, am I going to save money and it all comes full circle back to the pain. So I think for all of us companies that are trying to help each other, we need to focus on the pain part and help people make better decisions. I mean, if we're here as as to be try to be very helpful,
John Wright: then it really comes down to being helpful and we got to speak their language that they understand the best. So thanks a lot for tuning in and yeah, maybe your future episodes might be sounding a little different and I'm going to spend a bit more work on the presentation of it and yeah, try to get some really cool different people on board and talk about some challenging topics for some people might be uncomfortable, but for other people we want them to be like, oh wow, I never really saw data in that way or I never really realized I could unlock as much potential in my business.