Ryan is the marketing manager for Smarter Sales, an organization that provides business intelligence to other businesses specializing in sales. Generally, their business model involves researching the client organization, conducting targeted surveys or interviews, implementing a change, and observing the effect on organizational profits. For example, one of Smarter Sales' clients is Jill's Used Cars, Jill hired Smarter Sales to conduct a survey of her customers. In that survey, Smarter Sales worked to identify the specific factors that were leading customers to walk off her used car lot without making a purchase. With the results of that survey, Jill was able to change her staff's sales techniques to improve sales.

As a marketing manager, Ryan's job is to find ways to bring in new clients. One of the problems that he faces is that Smarter Sales' services are often expensive. Employee time is recorded hourly, and this expense is billed directly to clients. However, Ryan wants to find a way to assure clients that this time and expense is worthwhile - that Smarter Sales only spends additional hours on a project when those hours will lead to higher profits. To that end, Ryan collects records from all of Smarter Sales' clients over the past six months (cost to clients and their profitability). He wants to find evidence that there is a relationship between the ultimate amount of money charged by Smarter Sales (costs to clients) and the increase in client organizational profitability. That means he will have two numbers for each client - the total cost to the client and the percentage increase in monthly profit as a result of changes suggested by Smarter Sales. Ryan wants to know if there is a relationship between his client's profitability and how much clients spend in his organization (total cost).

1.What is the decision problem in this case?