Selling Data Science — Vicki Boykis

Summary

Half of your job — regardless of what that job is — is selling your work. Boykis describes the hard lesson of presenting technical analysis to executives: move charts forward, delete numbers, make headlines bigger. The methodology doesn't matter if people don't buy the result.

Consulting makes this dynamic explicit: money moves from companies to consultancies because consultants convince companies they have expertise worth paying for. In-house data science teams are rewarded with attention (meeting seats, headcount, promotions) rather than direct revenue visibility. Consulting surfaces the money flow.

The mental model: expertise without persuasion is invisible. Selling is a core skill, not an afterthought.

Relevance

Directly applicable to [[01-projects/phdata/index]] consulting work. Every deliverable needs a "selling layer" — the executive-facing summary that makes the technical work legible and valuable. This is a [[06-reference/concepts/skills-as-building-blocks]] candidate: "translating technical work for executives" is a repeatable, composable skill.

Also relevant to [[01-projects/newsletter/index]] — writing about data work is selling data work. The newsletter is a selling surface for consulting expertise.

Open Questions

• Do we have a standard "executive layer" template for phData deliverables?
• How does AI change the selling dynamic? Can the AI COO draft the persuasion layer while the human does the technical work?
• Is the in-house "attention economy" insight useful for positioning consulting engagements? (i.e., help internal champions earn attention)