Anecdotes Have No Place in Decision-Making for a Senior VP

Troy Draper is a data guy. So when he joined the leading tile brand, Dal-Tile, as senior vice president of operations and customer experience, he was surprised to learn that data was lacking. Instead, opinions and stories from the field drove their decision-making.

With a background that includes business intelligence (BI), Draper needed more than stories—he needed facts. So he set out to get them. Now, seven years later, data drives Dal-Tile’s sales organization. Not only do they have real-time analytics, but their data is also tied to KPIs and helps them forecast and predict next steps.

We sat down with Draper at Domopalooza 2024 to learn more about his data journey. 

How did your data journey begin? 

When I got to Dal-Tile, there was no system for business intelligence. Our system was “anecdotal information.” In our executive meetings, we’d make decisions based on what somebody thought in the field or at corporate. There were few facts involved. And that drove me up the wall.

So I quickly said, “We’re going to get a BI tool.” We assessed three tools. For me, the two most important things about a business intelligence tool are that it is user-friendly and easy to use for business users. After the exhaustive process, we chose Domo. My vision was that we would become a data-driven company where we made all decisions based on facts.

What challenges did you encounter? 

I had support for Domo on the company’s business side, but not from all groups. For example, we have several billion lines of code that we wanted to understand and access, but that proved to be a challenge as we were trying to figure out how to maintain our data’s integrity when giving it to a bunch of people in the business.   

Despite the challenges, it didn’t take long before we had a viable tool and could start inputting a lot of data sets and see what we got back from them. There was some trial and error in the beginning while we figured out how to make it do what we wanted it to do. But the system was flexible. And they had fun with it, too.

What were you hoping to achieve? 

I always look at analytics as a stepped process. The first step is just to have good data. And in the beginning, all we had was unstructured data. The second step in the process is applying analytics. This step gave us something we could actually look at to make sense of the business. And then the third step is ensuring the analytics are predictive. I’m big on trends and what they tell us for future projections. Finally, the fourth step is for analytics to be prescriptive, where the data would guide us on how to get where we want to go.

We have a small team, but they really understand the business. So now, if I have a question, I can ask, “Hey, can you give me the answer to this?” And they know exactly how to find the answer.

How have your efforts impacted Dal-Tile? 

We are dominant! Data now drives our business decision-making. It drives our sales management process and how we lead. And it’s made our discussions more fact-based. The anecdotal is gone.

We have dashboards in Domo that a manager looks at every day. They can then say, “Here are all my controllables, my sales, my margins, which product sold, my labor detail.” All of that’s integrated into the system. It’s basically become an operating system for us. You can’t run a location, you can’t sell, and you can’t lead if you’re not in Domo. 

My biggest achievement is seeing the team use Domo—how they’ve owned it, grown it, and how it’s so integrated and now runs our business. And ultimately, how much more effective we are.

Have you had any aha! moments during your journey? 

The first real aha! was that we weren’t in this thing alone. Domo provides the best support I’ve ever had. They were there to help us if we ever got frustrated or stuck. The second thing is realizing that change management is hard. There were people who fought any sort of change. But we rolled it out in stages, and as adoption grew from just a few to hundreds of users, and they saw the bells and whistles and real-time sales numbers, they were like, “Oh, I do need that.” 

Sales leaders used to get up every morning and check the numbers. Now we update them about every 15 minutes. I guarantee you, every sales leader I have in the field is in Domo at least 10 times a day.

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