Final answer:
The most sensible business rule for ranking the top 25 customers is to remove noise from the customer order data before ranking, ensuring accurate and fair representation of customer order values.
Step-by-step explanation:
When pulling the top 25 customers based on order amount, it is sensible to establish a business rule that centers around the quality and reliability of the sales data. Therefore, the most sensible business rule would be that noise will be removed from the customer order data before ranking. This means that you would clean the data of any anomalies or errors to ensure that the rankings are based on the most accurate information possible. It's a fair and logical practice as it places all customers on an equal footing and represents their true purchasing power. This rule is preferable over excluding customers with an outstanding invoice because it doesn't account for the total potential of a customer's orders and may penalize customers unfairly. Similarly, ranking customers by the highest single order amount isn't as representative of customer value as aggregate order amounts are.