The law of averages is one of those things that people talk about to the point of cliche.
When I am talking with sports teams that are still wed to cold calling as their primary form of prospecting, they talk about the law of averages when they are discussing their sales ratios.
When I deal with nonprofits and their development challenges, we often discuss what the average donor gives.
Hell, in the 2016 presidential primaries, for a different reason, Bernie Sanders talked about getting an average donation of $27 from his many funders.
All of these uses of the law of average are accurate, maybe even correct.
But the thing about averages is they don’t always tell the entire story.
If you are looking at your cold calling numbers and you say that you need to make 100 calls to have 2 sales conversations, that would put the emphasis on the activity.
But what would happen if you looked at the calls that were completed and asked yourself what did these conversations have in common.
Could you improve your sales conversation ratio? Could you more effectively target your calls?
Or, if you are looking at your development dollars, if your average donation was $20: how did you get to that $20?
Was there 1,000 donors with only 1 or 2 large donors giving a big percentage of the money?
Or, was it something else?
When you look at the numbers, what is the story really telling you?
The same goes for politics.
The same really applies to any situation.
Don’t be distracted by the averages, look at the bigger story that is being told by the averages and make sure that you are learning the lessons that are really important and moving you towards your goals.