The Truthiness of Number Spinning

Last week I was chatting with a LucidEra customer who told me that her hunch that the top sales reps were closing the biggest deals turned out to be completely false once she dug into the data. As much as she tried to prove her hypothesis by “slicing and dicing” the data in different ways, the numbers just wouldn’t lie for her. This important discovery ended up having a huge impact on the business…once she was able to prove that the data was accurate (and she wasn’t crazy!) to other people in the sales and finance organizations.

I was thinking about this story as I watch the pundits and democratic campaigns spin the numbers after Tuesday’s late-night results in Indiana. There seems to be a lot of truthiness in how people are spinning the numbers to match their world view. Personally, I look to the Numbers Guy for the hard facts. Check out this post on The Primary Math After Indiana and North Carolina. It contains a great summary of the results and some things to think about as you analyze the health of your sales pipeline and performance of your sales team:

• “Numerical narratives…have limitations.” 
• “A trend depends entirely on the endpoints you choose.”
• “Spinning the numbers is an exercise to influence…”

So don’t be mesmerized by ”magic maps“, pundit opinion, and number spinning truthiness. Just keep these famous quotes in mind:

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

—Mark Twain/Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910) quoted by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

“It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.”

—Charles Frederick Mosteller (1916–present)

“The plural of anecdote is not data.”

—Roger Brinner (dates unknown)

“There are two kinds of statistics: the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”

—Rex Stout (1886–1975)

posted by Darren Cunningham at 11:21 am

---