It was the CMO’s fault, for not asking WHY.
To kick off a Piano Analytics Day session on the Value of Data: from dashboards to decisions, a scenario was presented where a wrong decision was made. The question asked was “Is this a Data Quality problem?” If not, who is at fault.
You can see in the screenshot that the data was showing three consecutive weeks of 20% revenue growth. We were also advised that 60% of sales were via Paid Search. Cue celebrations and the bad decision, which was to increase budget spend on new customer acquisition campaigns.
The data was incomplete in that it didn’t show the breakdown in the revenue growth by customer type. It also didn’t explain what the 20% revenue growth was based on e.g. previous year, a forecast, etc.
With more data, we discover that the revenue growth was all due to existing customers, due to a promotional period. That promotional period was just about to end and the revenue for new customers was actually already dropping. But that information was only discovered by the marketing team too late, after decisions had been actioned.
The new budget spend went live but sales were tanking. The incremental marketing budget was wasted and the team was in a meeting to review and identify the culprit. Fingers are then pointed at Data Quality and the poor analyst who should have provided the marketing team with more data including that breakdown by customer type.
I agree, the analyst should have dug deeper and the dashboard should have had a selector for customer type. But I still point my finger at the CMO. They are responsible for knowing the business, not the analyst and not the dashboard.
Everyone in the business needs to question data, not just accept it at face value. They need to recognise data represents people and that they need to understand those people and that behaviour. Responsibility lies with the most senior person in the room to lead this approach, the CMO in this scenario.
They should have said, great, loving the 20% increase in revenue but WHY, what is driving this? Who are the people and why are they buying? Without this understanding, they don’t have the right information to make good decisions.
Businesses need people, in every role, who ask WHY and don’t simply accept the data. People who focus on getting the questions right, not on getting more answers. More powerful tools won’t solve this issue. More data won’t either. Asking the same questions via AI will only provide the same answers – unless you are relying on AI to always ask Why for you. But then who needs you?
This session from Piano started with asking “Has your data ever been completely accurate – and completely misleading? Not bad data. Not wrong data. Just data that was missing the part that mattered most to the business.”
Do you have any stories yourself, on when all the answers were available, but people were not asking good questions and thus missing the information they actually needed?
This post was originally published on LinkedIn on 18th June 2026. View the original post and discussion here.
