I’ve had versions of this conversation with lots of people.
“Ooh, look how many of these we’ve sold.”
“This customer’s ordered 40 times!”
“That new product is flying.”
“We’ve suddenly got loads of customers from Manchester.”
“Our top three products are always these ones.”
And I completely understand it.
I love finding things in the data too. One interesting number leads to another and before you know it you’re six questions deep into something you weren’t intending to look at.
But there’s an important difference between finding something interesting and using it to make a commercial decision.
The interesting observation might be:
This customer has ordered 40 times.
The useful questions start afterwards.
What did they buy?
How profitable are they?
Are there other customers who behave similarly?
When did that behaviour begin?
Could we have identified them earlier?
What happened between order one and order two?
Can we influence more customers to follow the same path?
Or perhaps, after looking at all of that, we discover they’re not actually the type of customer we particularly want more of.
Data becomes valuable when it changes a decision.
Until then, it’s just interesting.
And interesting is a very good place to start.
