Experience: The Metric You Can’t Export to Excel

Why your gut might be the most undervalued tool in the room.

At some point in your career, you start to feel the shift before it hits the dashboard.

You know the campaign won’t land, even if the research says otherwise. You spot the weak brief before the meeting even starts. You hear the hesitation and already know there’s a rewrite coming.

That’s not attitude. That’s not guesswork. That’s experience.

The kind you can’t really quantify. And definitely the kind that doesn’t show up in your Q2 performance review.

In Praise of the Dashboard

Data is valuable. It keeps us honest. It keeps us accountable. It helps align teams, build cases, and defend decisions in the room where the budget gets cut.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: Data is reactive. It tells you what happened after it happened. By the time it shows the dip, the missed message, the flop… you’re already deep in the post-mortem phase. Meanwhile, the person with twenty years of scar tissue already saw it coming.

Good Judgment Isn’t a Hunch. It’s Pattern Recognition.

The more campaigns you launch, messages you test, and teams you debrief, the more your brain starts running silent simulations. You don’t even notice it. But a sentence reads off. A visual doesn’t feel honest. And your instinct kicks in: “We’ve been here before. This won’t fly.” That’s not being old-school. That’s knowing the story before the plot twist. Because you’ve lived it.

Gut vs. Grid: The Real Balance of Marketing

This isn’t a pitch to throw out the data. You still test. You still measure. You still read the report, even when it confirms what you already knew. But you stop needing it to decide. You start using it to refine.

Why Experience Still Matters More Than We Admit

We value performance. Output. Engagement. Velocity. All easy to measure. But judgment? Timing? Taste? No dashboard can track that. And yet, when things fall apart, who do we call?The person who’s been here before.

So What Do We Do With All This?

If you’re the one with that kind of experience, don’t wait for the spreadsheet to back you up. If you’re leading a team, listen for instinct, not just evidence.

Because in marketing, timing is everything. And sometimes, the most strategic move is trusting what your gut is trying to tell you.

And that can’t be exported to Excel.