Our scorecard is packed with metrics like closed sales and completed projects, but we still feel reactive. How do we shift our focus from lagging results to weekly leading indicators?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Closed sales and completed projects are lagging indicators. They tell you what happened last week or last month. By the time these numbers show up red on your scorecard, the damage is already done, and you are forced to play defense.

To become proactive, you must identify the upstream activities that guarantee those lagging results. For example, if you need three closed sales per week, look at your sales pipeline. How many introductory calls lead to a proposal, and how many proposals lead to a close? If the ratio is one close out of three proposals, and it takes five calls to get a proposal, your weekly leading indicator is fifteen introductory calls.

Apply this same logic to every department. In operations, do not just track completed projects. Track the weekly milestone completion rate or the number of active support tickets resolved within twenty four hours.

A healthy weekly scorecard should consist of eighty percent leading indicators and twenty percent lagging indicators. When your leading indicators are consistently green, your lagging results will naturally take care of themselves. This shift gives you a two to three week warning track to fix performance issues before they hit your bottom line.