Let us say that your CEO calls you in one day and says the following to you:

“I want you to analyze the data you have on the first year of the pilot service offering. I have a few questions in mind that I think will help guide us towards what to do next. Could you write a report for me on them? They are:

First, how did the first-year sales go? The board suggested a good benchmark for successful first-year sales would be $75,000 per customer. How did we do against that?

Second, are our customers satisfied with the product? I know you have some recent data on this. I want us to aim for an average customer who indicates satisfaction.

Third, to what extent do they trust us? Again, I want to aim for pretty high trust levels, say 75% trust levels.

Fourth, how many enquiries did customers make? I’m wondering about whether to spin off a separate enhanced customer relationship management project, and this data will help me to know what to do about that.

Fifth, do sales, satisfaction, trust or enquiries differ depending on whether the customer has a premium or freeware contract? I’m pretty sure premium customers buy more, and it would help us to guide our marketing efforts if we knew the high-value segments.

Sixth, do sales, satisfaction, trust or enquiries differ depending on customer size? Once again, we’re thinking it’ll help with market segmentation.

Seventh, what is the distribution of licenses between the levels of size? I’m pretty sure the bigger companies buy more premium licenses, but I want the most up-to-date data.

Finally, and most importantly, are services sales seemingly substantially associated with any of the other variables? I specifically want to know what the drivers of sales are. Can we maybe move towards predicting sales levels?”

Throughout the rest of this book, we will discuss business statistics techniques that can help us to answer the CEO’s questions.