While data may derail, Intuition deserves an all hail

Have you ever wondered why a company running for more than ten years without any improvement and stagnating? It is so because they talk too much about metrics. The metrics such companies set as their goals are usually ambitious, greedy, or worse, unrealistic. Those that fall under the third bucket are deeply affected.

Can data ever be misleading?

Sometimes, yes. Having spent eight years in the digital marketing space, I can strongly state that data do lie too. Let us try to understand taking a Cricket analogy. Cricket is the most popular sport in India by far and is played almost everywhere.

• Sanath Jayasuriya secured more ODI wickets than Shane Warne
• The player who stood not out in Test cricket the most number of times is not Rahul Dravid but Courtney Walsh
• Inzamam Ul Haq took a wicket off his very first ball in the International Cricket
• Ajith Agarkar scored a test match century in the famous Lord’s ground but Sachin did not

Based on the above stats, can we state Sanath Jayasuriya was a great spinner than Shane Warne, Courtney Walsh a great test batsman than Rahul Dravid, Inzamam a great bowler since he got his wicket in his very first ball, Ajith Agarkar a great test batsman than Sachin? The answer is an obvious no. 

Get the basics right!

We should always get the basics right. Of course, data is crucial but not just data. The ones that really do matter are what you do, When do you do that, and how do you execute. In Cricketing language, it shall be called a classic execution of the basics with perfect timing.

From my experience, I could see that most of the digital marketers pull down the campaigns when the data doesn’t look good or massive in their Google Ads, Facebook/LinkedIn Marketing, etc

Let’s take a couple of scenarios:

Scenario 1: You spend $1000 and generate 100 leads 

Scenario 2: You spend $1000 and generate only 10 leads

Which of the two campaigns do you think is successful? The most probable answer will be scenario 1. But the underlying reality is that scenario 2 could be successful equally or at best more. When you get to close one enterprise order in scenario 2 then it's a booming success. At the same time, when all the 100 leads are junk in scenario 1, your ROI will be zero.

I faced the above situation. Our team celebrated the milestone having achieved around 250 leads in a single day. We treated ourselves with delicious food. Unfortunately, we had a distasteful dessert of news from the sales team that all the 250 leads were junk.

Where to use the data and when to?

Everyone will face a situation where 90% of people are new to marketing and/or with less awareness of the nature of marketing and sales/product-driven companies. In such situations, only data will help you convince people and not your intuition. 

Alternatively, when you’re surrounded by smart people, then kill the data, listen to everyone’s thoughtful ideas and go with their intuition. When some campaigns do not appear to perform well, give some more time for it to deliver results instead of shutting down the whole campaign. Keep optimizing the same for fetching solid output. Believe in people instead of just data.

Famous instances where people won not with data but with intuition

• Steve Jobs - Founder of Apple: In 1976 Steve Jobs started out to get a computer in the hands of every individual. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams just with his intuition. He literally had zero data to back his dream. Apple was the 1st trillion-dollar company in the world (PetroChina, a state-owned oil giant, was the first company to hit this mark during its initial public offering in 2007, though its value has declined dramatically since then) 
• Henry Ford - Founder Ford Motor: One of the first cars accessible to the masses was the 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. Cars were rapidly adopted in the US where they replaced animal-drawn carriages and carts, but took much longer to be accepted in Western Europe and other parts of the world. Henry Ford didn't just want to build a car — he wanted to build a lot of cars. When the entire world was riding a horse he had a different idea to build a lot of cars to sell in masses. 
• Mahendra Singh Dhoni - Former India Cricket Team Captain: In the 2007 T20 world cup final, Harbhajan Singh had one over left but Dhoni left everyone scratching their heads when he handed over the last over of the ICC World T20 final in 2007 to medium-pacer Joginder Sharma. Pakistan needed 13 runs to become first-ever T20 champions of the world and they had Misbah-ul-Haq at the crease who was batting at 37* off 35 deliveries. Misbah went for the paddle shot over a short fine leg but ended up hitting the ball into the hands of Sreesanth. Dhoni’s magical captaincy career had just begun with a historic title in Johannesburg not with historic data but with intuition. 
• Sundar Pichai - CEO Google: Sundar Pichai realized that Google should develop its own internet browser. During those times, browsers like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera dominated the browser landscape. So, he believed that Google should also have its very own browser. Sundar Pichai thought that in the future other browsers might not allow the installation of the Google Toolbar. Like Microsoft might force its own web search engine Bing on its users. As Google makes most of its revenue through advertisements, its revenues will get significantly affected when its search business is at the mercy of other browsers. Even though Google had its own search engine Sundar Pichai invented Google chrome with his intuition, not with data.

Where people lost with data by not betting on intuition 

• Yahoo, Google & Microsoft - 1998: Yahoo refuses to buy Google for the US $1 million, 2002: Yahoo then tries to buy Google for the US $3 billion. Google wants the US $5 billion. Yahoo refuses. 2008: Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for the US $40 billion. Yahoo says no. 2016: Yahoo sold to Verizon for the US $4.6 billion. All the above decisions are made with data, Yahoo forecasted Google’s growth with valuation, they predicted their growth with data which backfired 8 years later 
• Ar Rahman - Oscar award winner - Due to A R Rahman’s family situation, he decided to work to support his family. which led to him to routinely miss classes and fail exams. Therefore, the school Principal summoned Rahman and his mother and told them that Rahman should focus on academics irrespective of family circumstances. Rahman dropped out of school to pursue a full-time career as a musician later he grabbed two oscar awards and he is India’s greatest musician of all time. A R Rahman school principal rejected him by his data so-called academics.
• Jackma - Founder Alibaba Group - After graduating from high school, JackMa applied for Hangzhou Teachers' college but failed his entrance exam twice. JackMa then started applying to every job he could but received more than a dozen rejections including one from KFC and ten from Harvard. He even applied to be a police officer. But they rejected him, saying three simple words: You're no good. Jack Ma had no experience with the Internet or coding but he was fascinated by it when he used the Internet for the first time during his trip to the United States in 1995. In 2005, Alibaba attracted the attention of the American Internet portal Yahoo!, which bought a 40 percent stake, and in 2007 Alibaba.com raised 1.7 billion USD in its initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong. KFC, Hangzhou rejected Jackma with data, it's a resume, and the entrance exam.

Following metrics blindly have gone out of trend even at the hiring level. Organizations are soon realizing the importance of skills over grades. For instance, two such people I know from recent times are Mr. George - CTO/MacAppStudio and Mr. Suresh Kumar - CEO, MacApp studio. They never ask for any academics and even they never worry about your resume and they never care what skill or talent you have. They just simply hire you when you are honest and they did a multimillion-dollar company with this strategy. There are so many people in our daily life where we can say they just work with intuition not with data and went on to become successful people in their own field. 

Summing up, do respect the idea regardless of the people’s background, identify the talent, and let not the data kill your campaigns. When you fail, take it as a learning experience in this competitive world. Most of the time we can’t afford to fail.We should learn from others' failures and make sure our campaign doesn’t fail for the same reason as it did early with us or with someone. 

Great campaigns never come with data but with skill. It can be a small optimization in Google Ads like bid changes, Adcopy changes, a small keyword change in your SEO meta tags, creative change in your social media marketing, increase/decrease your daily budget. Just go for it and take a calculative risk and you should know at what extent you afford to make an experimentation.