“I don’t take much stock in fancy marketing research – Sales knows our markets best.”

Our Sales Department continued to send out the kinda-cool-but-really-expensive dimensional mailer, even when we proved that the piece had horrible ROI compared to the letter version. Sales was afraid that acting on data would make their opinions and recommendations about their own territories less valuable. Framing the data as assistive rather than directive made it possible to move forward.

“That can’t be true.”

Counter-intuitive findings must be presented very carefully. That goes double if the audience is the C-suite. First reactions to surprising data are often disbelief, discrediting the methodology at best, and/or shooting the messenger at worst. Have bulletproof backup supporting your results – including visuals – especially if it’s negative news. Be mindful not to make them appear stupid or clueless, or your data (and possibly your career) won’t get beyond the conference room.

“You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know.”

Hard-working folks in the trenches can feel threatened when those slick marketing folks waltz in and act like they’re The Oracle of Delphi, spouting wisdom. It becomes a Catch-22.

When data doesn’t support their gut, they resist. When it does, you’d think they’d be happy. Yet, they will often declare instead that they already knew that, so the research adds no value. Tell them they may be right – it might not be necessary if they can guarantee their intuition is 100% infallible, 100% of the time. Hands? Anybody?

Data-driven organizations get beyond the “Two anecdotes make a trend” approach to business intelligence. But data must be acted on by people, and people are not entirely data-driven. There are emotions to contend with – especially fear – that might make a data message hard to assimilate.

Presenting data with emotional intelligence is as important as crunching it. Anticipate what your audience is afraid of.  Name it. Then address it with your data.