In my experience, the most important factor for success in business is the ability to interact well with other people. Leadership skills, financial acumen, and technical expertise all matter a lot, but they don’t amount to a hill of beans without solid people skills.

The reality is none of us can be successful completely on our own. We need the help of other people — peers, staff, managers, vendors, or business partners — to successfully accomplish our tasks and goals.

Human relationships are more complicated than Wall Street financial schemes, but we often take interpersonal skills for granted. We rarely study them to the degree we study financial or technical skills. After all, we’ve been talking to people all our lives. We’re experienced. But I’ll argue there are subtleties that make all the difference, and they’re worth studying.

In today’s business world, we’re drowning in data. We track nearly everything, constantly analyzing the numbers. Yet, the sheer volume of data can be so overwhelming that it often leads to a shortage of actionable insights.

All that data is worthless—or worse—if we don’t produce thoughtful analysis and carefully craft communication of our findings in ways that enable decision-makers to react to the data rather than try to analyze it themselves.

To navigate the data deluge and extract meaningful insights, I’ve found a framework that consistently produces effective analysis. It’s all about achieving F.A.M.E., baby!

We need to focus on four key attributes: Focused, Actionable, Manageable, and Enlightening.

Here, in my experience, are the keys to achieving FAME in analysis:

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” —George Bernard Shaw

I read that quote the other day, and it kind of blew me away. How often, as managers, executives, marketers and team members do we send forth messages and assume effective communication has taken place? I know that I personally have been guilty of spewing forth my thoughts and directives in ways that were clear to me but were not nearly clear enough to my audience.

Over the weekend, I did a bit of reading on communication. As I read Wikipedia’s article on communication, I was reminded of the technical breakdown of communication I learned in my college Organizational Behavior class. While those explanations are useful, I really wanted to think about communication in more practical terms. While communication between individuals is very important in business, effective one-to-many communication can often be extremely challenging.

Technology may impede quality.

Acquiring new customers is hard work, but turning them into loyal customers is even harder. The acquisition efforts can usually come almost solely from the Marketing department, but customer retention takes a village. And all those villagers have to march to the beat of a strategy that effectively balances the concepts of bought loyalty and earned loyalty.

I first heard the concepts of bought and earned loyalty many years ago in a speech given by former ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed, and those concepts stuck with me. They’re not mutually exclusive. In the most effective retention strategies I’ve seen, bought loyalty is a subset of a larger earned loyalty strategy.

So let’s break each down a bit and discuss how they work together.