Difference / association

Find out what actually differs or moves together with the outcome you care about.

Some of your sales calls end in a deal and some evaporate, and you've been explaining the gap with mood-based theories: good energy, bad timing, chemistry. You've never actually laid the calls side by side to see what the closed ones share. The answer might be sitting in your own calendar and notes, unexamined.

Difference / association is the evidence job of finding out what actually differs, or moves together, with the outcome you care about. It doesn't yet prove cause; it locates the patterns worth investigating. The cue is an outcome that varies across cases you have records of, paired with explanations you've never checked against those records. The operation: gather both groups, the roughly 20 closed and 20 lost calls from this quarter, then compare them on concrete features: who booked the call, deal size, whether a demo happened, day of week, how fast you followed up. Look for features that split cleanly between groups, like follow-up within 24 hours appearing in most wins and few losses. What changes is that vague chemistry theories give way to two or three specific candidate levers. Resist treating an association as a cause, though; fast follow-up might just mark the deals that were already hot.