When Reporting Suddenly Matters

Years ago, when I was VP of Sales Operations at a global market research company, I was in a meeting with our CEO.

A problem was being discussed and he asked me a simple question:

“Has this trend been happening for several years?”

As the keeper of the sales data, the question landed directly on me.

I told him I couldn’t answer it.

The data simply didn’t exist.

After the meeting he pulled me aside and said:

“When a CEO asks for something, they really don’t want the answer to be no.”

I understood his frustration. But the reality was simple.

We had never designed our systems to collect that data point.

It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t hard to analyze. It simply didn’t exist.

The only way to answer the question would have been to reconstruct years of information manually.

That moment reinforced something I’ve seen many times since.

Organizations spend enormous energy designing products, processes, and customer experiences.

But the data collected in their systems that produce leadership visibility are often treated as an afterthought. What exists is whatever happens to be collected through the normal business processes.

And eventually leadership asks a question the organization can’t answer.