April 2024 Round-Up: What gets measured gets managed, and if it isn't measured, it doesn’t matter!

During the month of April, we reviewed our Q1 results in the rearview mirror and set the targets for Q2. Happily, we have had two quarters of hitting targets in a row (Q4, Q1), and as I write this at the end of the first month of Q2, the metrics are shaping up nicely for another quarter of hitting targets.

We don’t always hit our goals, and reviewing your misses is as important as celebrating your wins to gain insights as to why and set actions to correct them.

The first question is to know what to measure and then, when to measure. 

To that end, we have a weekly scorecard (Read the book Traction for more insights on this process) that measures metrics by function: 

• Marketing
• Sales 
• Delivery 
• Finance

These give us every week:

• Description/Lagging Metrics: What activities occurred
• Perception/Leading Metrics: What is going to happen  
• Outcome/Results Metrics: What was the result of actions taken (or not taken)

Beating the drum and reviewing these metrics weekly as a whole team has aligned our actions to drive our results and take corrective actions when things are slipping. This process has been in place for over twelve months, transforming our results. 

Prior to this process, we reviewed metrics monthly, and they were all Outcome Metrics. We did not have the details measured that were driving the outcomes (Description or Perception Metrics), nor a timely enough review mechanism in place to correct them. If things go wrong for a month, it is a tough row to hoe to get things back on track for the next month and thus, the quarter.

As a result, we hit goals when planning and executing went well (according to plan) but missed when corrections were needed faster than the monthly interval.  So overall, progress was being made, but we knew we could do better. To this end, all these metrics you measure must influence your critical numbers.

What are your critical numbers?  

A critical number is the 1- 3  things a business must do to achieve its primary goal ( i.e. driving revenues, acquiring customers, reactivating customers or increasing EBIT).

These numbers may change over time, as it may be the things you need to focus on for a quarter to make a correction, or it could be the number to focus on for a year to hit your annual goals. For us, we have determined three critical numbers:

• Meetings Booked (Description Metric)
• Utilization Rate (Outcome Metric)
• CSAT   (Outcome Metric) 

If we hit these three goals quarterly, our primary revenue and EBIT goals will also be met. To illustrate why Meetings Booked is a critical number, let's look at all the metrics that flow into and out of it:

• If we get X prospects to our website who book a discovery call, and we do X outreach to book discovery calls, we will get X deals.  
• So X discovery calls = X deals.
• We also know how many deals we need to hit our goals, as we know our average deal size and our close rate. 
• We also know how many days it takes to convert a lead into a deal and a deal to a customer. 

All this backward-and-forward math tells us how many discovery meetings we need to drive the business's revenue results.

Hit Meetings Booked, you get your revenue goals.  

Miss that metric you struggle.  

What I can say from experience is we have hit our revenue goals when we missed the metric, but it felt desperate, or we got lucky (a big deal blew in that skewed the regular numbers). But every month we hit meetings booked, the revenue goals felt easy.  Take this April. As of the 24th, we had hit our Booked a Meetings goal, and guess what? Our sales quota for the month was also hit. 

Know your critical numbers!

What gets measured gets managed, if it isn't measured it doesn’t matter.

Roadmap First Quarterly Town Hall

We’ve always been a remote company, so there’s not much for stopping by someone’s desk to have a chat or grabbing a coffee to catch up. So, this year, we committed to running quarterly townhalls. To start, we dedicated a half day of reviewing key client work, status updates on client and company goals and some fun trivia to break it all up.

We also ran a workshop session on our own customer journey from client onboarding to off-boarding.  As a baseline, we have a documented journey with SOPs and workflows in place, plus the voice of the customer surveys and previous customer councils informing us about the impact of our work.

Improving your customer experience is a mountain with no top.  You must always be striving to create an exceptional journey. It was a great time to brainstorm as an entire team about all the little touches to make moments in our journey better. 

We reviewed where we could add collateral and workflows to increase delight, remove friction and eliminate gaps to work towards creating an exceptional branded experience for our clients.

"Hey, I need a website. What is it that I need to do?" 

Your website is: 

• A 24-hours salesperson,
• A 24-hour service tech,
• And the heart of your demand generation ecosystem

It must serve your ideal clients — and must immediately tell them what it is you do, the problem you solve, and reassure them they are in the right place. 

Steve explains further in his latest video below. 

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