Thursday, January 13, 2011

When people pay you to tell them they are wrong

Being a consultant can be tricky, particularly when you work in areas like analytics, rather than in a strict technical capacity.

Customers want you to come in and tell them how to improve their business, how to make those incremental uplifts in their business to make them look good to the boss.

What they don't like is when you point out a glaring issue that has been overlooked or perhaps misunderstood.

I'm talking about those people who believe high correlations between key KPIs mean they should break out the champers. (people should look at how things are correlated and what the connection means)

I'm talking about online marketers doing a great job spending loads of money on online marketing only to find 98% of purchases are from customers dropping directly on the site or who perhaps are existing customers that would have come to the site regardless of the "lookup" in the google phonebook.

I'm talking about the person who hasn't noticed the big errors firing all over the site when a customer tries to make a purchase.

I'm talking about the designer who seems to actively want you to start the purchase process every single time the customer enters something wrong in the application form.

I'm talking about the people who for the past 10 years have read the wrong number on a chart.

I get paid to explain where they might be going wrong.

I'm not always asked back.

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