A Clue Is Not a Conclusion

I was getting ready for a conversation with a sales leader at a food distributor in Western New York this week, so I started digging into his market. Restaurants. Businesses. New locations. Industry activity. Anything that might help me understand the territory his team works every day.

It didn't take long to find interesting things. Finding information was never the problem, because there's an absurd amount of it out there if you're willing to look. The problem was figuring out what any of it actually meant.

That got me thinking about something I keep running into. A clue is not a conclusion. And we're getting dangerously good at confusing the two.

One piece of information, six stories

Say you sell supplies to restaurants, and you discover that a business has applied for a liquor license. Interesting, right? Maybe it's a new restaurant. Maybe an existing one is expanding. Maybe there's a new owner. Maybe they open in six weeks, and that's a great opportunity.

Except maybe it's an existing restaurant changing its license. Maybe it's paperwork tied to an ownership transfer. Maybe the business won't open for another year. Maybe it never opens at all.

You have one piece of information and about six different stories you could tell yourself about it. Some of those stories are useful. Some are completely wrong. The trouble starts when we pick the most exciting explanation and start treating it like a fact.

The same pattern shows up everywhere

Take commercial real estate. A property changes hands. What does that mean? An investor bought it? An owner-user is moving in? A redevelopment is coming? The business occupying the building is expanding? Or did somebody simply move an asset between two entities they already control? Those are very different situations, and they lead to very different decisions. Or no decision at all.

Now imagine you're a commercial banker looking at the same property. The transaction might be interesting, but it doesn't automatically mean anyone needs financing. You'd want to understand a lot more before making that assumption.

Same information. Different interpretations. Different opportunities. And a pretty big difference between something worth investigating and something you actually know.

The temptation is to connect the dots

I love connecting dots, probably more than I should. Find one piece of information, connect it to another, notice that something changed, and suddenly you've got a story. When the story makes sense, it's incredibly tempting to believe it, because humans are pattern-finding machines. Give us three dots and we'll draw a line. Give us six and we'll draw a business plan. Give me twelve and apparently I'll start another company.

But there's a distinction I've been trying to get better at recognizing: a plausible explanation is not the same thing as a verified explanation. That sounds painfully obvious, right up until you're staring at a pile of information that seems to fit together perfectly.

Explanations are now cheaper than verification

For most of my career, finding information was the expensive part. You had to know where to look. You had to spend time researching, make calls, and know somebody who knew somebody. Sometimes you just had to get in your car and drive around. A good salesperson could build a career on knowing things about a territory that nobody else knew, and plenty still do.

Now we can gather, organize and analyze information at a scale that would have been ridiculous a few years ago. That's a tremendous advantage. It also introduces a problem we didn't have to worry about as much before: we can generate explanations faster than we can verify them.

And the explanations sound awfully convincing, especially when they arrive in a beautifully formatted report, or a dashboard, or a summary written with the confidence of a guy who's never been wrong about anything in his life. I've met a few of those guys. Usually in sales. Occasionally in the mirror. It's the same trap I wrote about in You Can Drown in Information: more information is not the same as more understanding.

Ask what it gives you a reason to investigate

So I've been asking a different question. Instead of “What does this information tell me?” I'm trying to ask “What does this information give me a reason to investigate?” It's a small change in language and a meaningful change in how you approach a problem.

A company hiring 50 people doesn't necessarily mean it's growing. Maybe it's replacing people who left. A business opening another location doesn't necessarily mean it's financially healthy. Maybe it's taking a huge gamble. A competitor closing doesn't automatically mean its customers are available. Maybe those customers were the reason it closed. A sudden increase in activity doesn't necessarily mean an opportunity exists. It means something happened, and now there's a reason to get curious.

What this changes in a sales conversation

Picture two salespeople approaching the same prospect. The first says, “I see you're expanding. We can help support your growth.” That sounds professional. It's also potentially completely wrong.

The second says, “I noticed some activity around your business recently. Are you making changes, or am I reading too much into it?” That second conversation might actually go somewhere, because the salesperson isn't pretending to know something they don't. They're using research to ask a better question and giving the customer room to explain.

That's the part I think gets overlooked. Good research shouldn't eliminate the need for a conversation. It should make the conversation more valuable. It's also why outside signals are only a starting point, a theme I came back to in The Next Move Belongs to the Market.

More information is not more certainty

I've been thinking about this distinction while building different things lately. It's easy to get excited about how many companies we can identify, how many relationships we can uncover and how many changes we can detect. All of that is useful. But there's a point where having more information creates the illusion that we have more certainty. We don't. We just have more information, and those are not the same thing.

I think the companies that understand the difference will have a significant advantage. Not because they have the biggest databases or produce the prettiest reports, but because they understand what their information can actually support. And, just as important, what it can't.

Three questions I keep coming back to

When I discover something interesting, I try to work through three questions.

What do I actually know? Not what I suspect, and not what seems likely. What can I reasonably establish?

What am I assuming? What's the story I've started telling myself, and what other explanations could be true?

What would I need to learn next? Sometimes that's another piece of research. Sometimes it's checking a public record. Sometimes it's asking somebody who's been in the industry for 30 years. And sometimes it's simply picking up the phone. That last one is becoming increasingly important to me, because I can spend another afternoon gathering information and still not learn what a five-minute conversation would reveal.

Judgment is knowing what you don't know

I don't think the future belongs to the companies that know everything. That's probably impossible anyway. I think it belongs to the companies that get exceptionally good at knowing what they know, what they don't, and what deserves their attention next. That takes more than information. It takes judgment, and judgment doesn't mean always having the answer. Sometimes it means recognizing when you don't.

The purpose of intelligence isn't to eliminate uncertainty. It's to help you make better decisions in spite of it. A clue can point you in the right direction. A pattern can give you something worth investigating. A piece of research can help you ask a much better question. None of those things automatically gives you the answer, and the more information we have at our fingertips, the more that distinction matters.

Because the most dangerous thing isn't not knowing. It's being absolutely certain about something you've only guessed.

That is how I build the daily account lists for field sales teams: each account comes with the dated public record behind it and who to ask for, as a reason to call, not a conclusion. If your reps cover a territory, try it on yours. What's your territory? Tell me at whoandwhynow.com/early-access, and within three business days I'll send up to seven accounts there that just changed. If I can't see it well enough yet, I'll tell you within two business days.

Telling a signal from a fact is the thinking behind our growth and sales intelligence work: research that makes the next conversation better instead of replacing it. New to the series? Start with What Is an Intelligence Estate.

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