Our leadership team is obsessed with tracking monthly revenue and profit on our weekly Scorecard, but these numbers do not help us make real-time decisions because they are lagging. How do we successfully transition our team from tracking historical financials to tracking weekly leading indicators?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To transition your team away from lagging financials, you must help them understand that looking at monthly revenue to run a business is like driving a car by only looking in the rearview mirror. Revenue and profit are the results of activities that happened weeks or months ago.

To build a predictive Scorecard, you must identify the upstream activities that generate those financial results. For example, if your goal is fifty thousand dollars in weekly revenue, trace that back:
- How many sales proposals must be sent to hit that number?
- How many discovery calls are required to send those proposals?
- How many leads are needed to generate those discovery calls?

Those upstream activities are your leading indicators. Put those activity-based numbers on your weekly Scorecard. When your team sees that a drop in discovery calls this week predictably leads to a drop in revenue three weeks from now, they will finally understand the value of running on leading data.

Focus on the inputs, and the financial outputs will take care of themselves. Stop letting your team report on what already happened and start holding them accountable to the weekly activities that drive the future.