A Rant Against Anecdotal Decision Making

This post is a mini-rant against what I’ll call “anecdotal decision making”. This is a type of decision making where major, impactful decisions get made based on few anecdotes, perceptions and/or the feedback from some squeaky wheels.  Limited time or no time is spent looking at facts, data etc….

As Sales and Sales Operations leaders, it is our responsibility to prevent anecdotal only- decision making and bring in the facts, data, trends and big picture view that is necessary to drive the business forward. This may mean standing up to the highest levels including the CEO.

Does this sound familiar? The CEO decides to eat lunch in the cafeteria. (The first time all year.) While she “presses the flesh” and chats with employees, a few sales reps express concerns about the quality of data in the Salesforce CRM system. Later that day, you get pulled into a meeting and have to “drop everything” to help create and implement a major initiative to clean sales data.

The CEO made an assumption that the complaints of a few are 1) a concern that the majority have and 2) should be addressed as a priority, without learning more about the problem or considering what other initiatives may already be in the works.

I started thinking about anecdotal decision making the other day, after reading an excellent e-book by Marketing Guru, John Fox, called “5 Management Blunders Causing Sales Impotence”. In this informative, original read, John discusses Sales Management practices that actually drive down or prevent sales and one of the five blunders really resonated with me: “Letting Sales Reps decide which marketing activities get done”.

I am 100% in support of asking Sales Reps for feedback on marketing plans and strategies. But, the ultimate decision making should be with the experts who have the skills, training, data and qualifications. Often times Sales Reps have a narrow view of what’s happening in their individual territory or geographic location, while the marketing team has access to more global information.  It should be a partnership with Sales & Marketing… but Sales should not be making the final decisions on marketing spend.

This made me think of an experience I had a few years back, tied to my company’s return policy. The perception, based on anecdotal evidence, was that “Customers Are Abusing Our Return Policy – Change It!”

I was working for a catalog marketer of business supplies and was in charge of their Inbound Call Center team. I started to hear rumblings that the Marketing team wanted to change our return policy, which was a 100% satisfaction guarantee for all of our stock products. Their perception was that customers were taking advantage of the policy and the company was losing money. Why? They had overheard chatter in the cafeteria about some isolated customer situations and had heard some complaints from the “pick and pack” team about the number of returns.

A week or so later I received a meeting request from the head of Marketing and the topic was- “changing our return policy”. And my boss, who was the President of the division, also mentioned that the marketing folks were concerned.

As You Can Plainly See..LOL

However, I knew that customers were not abusing the policy and that the 100% guarantee differentiated us from our competitors and was a great sales tool when Reps tried to cross-sell new products.

So.. I pulled some data.

We worked in a very transactional environment and had about 500,000 orders processed per year. The facts showed that over a one year period, 99% of our customers (about 495,000 orders) did not return any of our products. Of the remaining 1% that did return our products, 70-80% of the time it was due to our internal error- ex. we shipped them the wrong product. Of the remaining .002% of customers, that did make a return because they were simply not satisfied, most only returned a product one time. There were a handful of customers that had multiple returns.

When I met with Marketing and shared my data and the advantages of the 100% guarantee, they backed off and we did not change the policy.

What does all this mean..

I’ll say it again…As Sales and Sales Operations leaders, it is our responsibility to prevent anecdotal only- decision making and bring in the facts, subject matter experts, data, trends and big picture view that is necessary to make sound decisions. With that said.. we don’t want analysis paralysis either. There is a happy medium.

Let’s be part of the Sales Growth plan, not the Sales Prevention plan

Thanks for listening!!