I will officially confess my affinity for productivity porn. I have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and enjoy the pearls at 43Folders and LifeHacker. I have even been known to fill a few moleskins in my day. Luckily, I appear to be in good company with Marc Andreessen, whose modified GTD is closer to my own processes.
But!
Far too often we get bogged down in the preparation to be productive. Or, sometimes even worse, the tracking of that productivity.
This has long been a frustration of mine. The business world is littered with consultants, pundits, critics, analyst, and my personal favorite–silver bullet business books. Each can be incrementally valuable, but most times they are simply a distraction to simply getting started.
My recurring itch for this topic was flared today by back-to-back posts at LeadCritic on reports and metrics. You can see where I am going with this if you have ever crossed my banter on this topic in the past, on LeadCritic:
As you will see in the whitepaper, I am a big advocate of instituting metrics in a framework designed for action. My approach starts with a few high-level defined objectives. They should be broad in scope, but specifically targeted at the top line (bottomline, expense, metrics ALWAYS get you looking at your feet and those kids ALWAYS lose).
and my own Better Closer, back in 2006:
Although metrics and analytics are critical to the continual improvement of any business process, it does not ensure what you have learned will get implemented. This can be a critical disconnect in high velocity business process.
Sales is hard. It is a constant roller coaster of successes and failures. Customer contact and engagement is the biggest enemy and fear of even the best sales person.
The last thing a good sales force needs is to be bogged in opportunities to delay that next engagement. Reports and metrics often become that convenient distraction. Slicing and dicing reports to look for that perfect set of leads to try is wasted production. Lead management, by definition, should be maximizing your opportunities–automatically. Reports and metrics should be incidental to performance and indicative of production. More simply, reports and metrics don’t convert they only indicate if you did.
The single best thing you can do for your sales process is reposition the function of reporting.
Metrics and reports do not define or create a process. They should not be the front-end of lead management. They should be the passive observation of trends and behaviors. Indicators and triggers for adjustment.
This is captured perfectly by this story; from a guy that truly gets how you make analytics matter, Jamie McDonald:
At lunch one day with the CEO of the business, I saw him pull a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. It was his one page dashboard. His four key metrics:
- number of visits to the park in the previous day (volume measure for his business)
- avg. wait time at the rides
- avg. spend per park visitor
- hotel occupancy rate and average daily rate
In my mind, more complex than this often begs the question, “do you know what business you are in?”
Growing your business or your revenue is rarely about focusing on efficiency (reports and metrics), but rather your ability to repeatedly execute getting started.
