The picture to the left shows Zeus and Thetis. This image summarizes my nearly six hour meeting with a Left Coast (San Francisco) client today. Our top two salespeople flew out there yesterday for an in-person meeting with them, while I conferenced and WebEx-ed in from the Right Coast. My boss listened in but had his mute button on the whole time. The client wanted me out there too, along with my boss, but I can't do air travel with a sick cat (nor will a boarding kennel take a sick animal), and my boss had to teach class this evening at FIT.

In the end I was far more useful where I was, because I could run a live demo of how one approach we suggested would work, and show them some real numbers. I made serious progress, by staying late last night, long after our sales people were on their respective flights, and running out more numbers this morning before the meeting, while simultaneously juggling panicky phone calls from one of them.

During the meeting, I tried a couple of things on the fly and produced more numbers for them to look at, proving that yes, we could tweak their overall audience estimate differently from the overall average by demographic segments within it. Okay, the last set of numbers produced got the male/female skew correctly, but also proved that we needed to further refine it by age within gender. Their head research guy looked at the numbers, assessed them the same way I did, and completely agreed with me. There were cheers all around.

The client needs to go blow out a spreadsheet the head research guy there created to include a bunch of other demographics over then next couple of business days, and from there, I can crunch the scaling factors I need by demo within the overall Adults 18+ population, and create the "composite" audience codes the client needs for different sales packages it offers. There really are benefits to getting the head numbers nerds together, even remotely to hash through the numerical minutae.

Our head saleswoman joked "that the more numbers she (meaning I) sees on a spreadsheet, the happier she is, whereas my eyes would glaze over." The truth is, that's the truth. Yes, her eyes would glaze over, and yes, I want all the numbers our client can give me, against which to check those that ultimately come off our system when I'm done working my voodoo. I merely replied "It's a by-product of being a numbers nerd, you understand..." to which the head research guy there laughed and said "We like nerds!"

At the end, everyone went away happy--my salespeople, the folks at the client, my own boss for my handling the meeting so well, and finally, I. The folks at the client were left with the impression that yes, we understand what their goals are, we know what the f*** we're doing, we have research integrity, we know how to accomplish their goals, and have a solid game plan with timelines for achieving them. Our salespeople no doubt were left breathing a huge sigh of relief that I bailed their butts out of the sinkhole into which they had tossed my department.

I had a feeling of god-like power after that meeting. Stopped by my boss' office next door afterward to fill him in on the 20 minutes he missed at the very end. Even told him that I was experiencing a feeling of god-like power, but not to worry, because "it'll pass." Let's just say that in the above image, I am not Thetis. You get one guess who is.