The Data Was Already There. No One Had Looked.

Five months into my first job, I worked on a small team at an electronics and component retailer. The company sold paid training courses on microcontrollers and robotics, twenty seats per course, across different subjects, not just as a standalone product, but as a way to bring students into the main store. Course projects needed real components, and the courses were designed to turn students into regular customers.

But none of that mattered if the seats didn’t fill.

The company’s plan to fill them was simple: leafleting and campus visits. Print, distribute, hope. Month after month, the seats stayed hard to fill. The money kept going to the same two channels anyway.

No one had actually checked where our registrants were coming from. Everyone assumed physical marketing just worked for students. No one had tested that assumption.

Finding the Pattern

I went back through old registration forms. One question on the form asked how the student heard about the course. Nobody had used that data before, it just sat there. When I pulled it together, the pattern was clear: over 64% of registrants found us through our Facebook page. Most of the rest came from friends or senior students. Word of mouth, not leaflets.

The leafleting and campus activation weren’t just weak. They barely mattered to how people actually found us.

Raising It, and Hitting a Wall

I put the numbers into a report and showed it to my supervisor. He didn’t agree. He was upset that I was questioning a plan already in motion. He told me to just do my job, not question the strategy.

That put me in a tough spot. I was still on probation, five months into my first real job. The data said one thing. My supervisor said another. Staying quiet would have been the safe choice.

I didn’t stay quiet. I took the report straight to top management, without my supervisor’s approval.

A Different Response, and a Real Test

My supervisor was angry enough that he wanted me fired for going around him. But top management looked at the numbers differently. They didn’t see it as disrespect, they saw it as useful information. Instead of just approving a new strategy on my word, they gave me a real test: fill the next twenty seats using Facebook, or any digital method, with a small budget.

Building the Case, Not Just the Argument

I didn’t have much to spend, so every decision had to count. I built a simple character based on our actual target student. I used that character in story-style social media posts, instead of generic course ads. I added videos of real course projects, so students could see what they’d actually build. I updated the course details on our website. And I spent $60 on targeted Facebook ads pointing straight to the registration page.

What the Numbers Showed

Within 15 days, the next course was fully booked. This beat what leafleting had struggled to do over months, and it cost a fraction of the price. And because the courses existed to drive store traffic in the first place, every new registration also meant a related sale, exactly what the training business was designed to do, just finally working the way it was supposed to.

The Broader Lesson

It’s easier to defend a plan that’s already running than to check if it’s actually working.

The strategy hadn’t failed because it was a bad idea. It had failed because it was never tested against where customers actually came from.