Our business has a long sales cycle of six to twelve months. How do we design a weekly scorecard that gives us an accurate pulse when our lag indicators take a year to materialize?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your business has a six to twelve month sales cycle, tracking only closed deals on your weekly scorecard is useless. It leaves you flying blind for months at a time. To run a highly predictable operation, you must design your scorecard around the high velocity upstream activities that occur every single week.

Break your long sales cycle down into its predictable, sequential steps. Every major transaction begins with small, measurable actions. Instead of focusing on the final contract, track the volume and quality of your top of funnel and mid funnel activities.

Your weekly scorecard should track metrics such as:
- Number of high value target accounts identified and researched.
- Number of personalized outbound connections made to key decision makers.
- Number of initial discovery conversations scheduled and completed.
- Number of formal proposals delivered to qualified prospects.

By tracking these leading indicators, you can predict your revenue months in advance. If your target is to close two deals a month, and you know it takes sixty discovery calls to get one proposal, and five proposals to close one deal, your weekly target is clear. If your discovery calls drop this week, you know your revenue will suffer in six months, giving you plenty of time to correct course.