Measure Everything

Do you remember when you were a kid measuring yourself against the wall every few days to see how much you have grown?  Why did you do it?  

I think inherently we like the ability to compare…compare against yourself…where was I last month…last year.  

How do you know where you are if you don't look at a map?  At a start-up  dollars and time seem to be the scarcest resource…so it is how you spend your time and your dollars that matters.   

We measured every lead source…figured out what had the highest close percentage to an initial meeting, proof of concept and to revenue and how long it took at each phase.  We measured reps, ramp times, sales stage close percentages, pilot conversions and of course where are we in the quarter vs. same time last month, last quarter, last year. 

By the way if you want good data you have to be serious about it…I was fanatical in the early days and remained that way – I would call or email reps all the time asking them about a data entry in salesforce.com that did not match another data point that I heard.   (By the way - Our CEO did it too -- he would call me or the reps directly -- huge impact).

Monday morning forecast calls could be a source of fear for some of our sales people or an opportunity to shine.   Many of the team members thought I asked random questions… in fact I studied Salesforce.com the night prior to look for things that did not make sense to me…or strategic opportunities that I wanted the entire team to know about. 

I tried not to be mean (some may say I was) but I was always direct…I explained why it was important to the business and that it was the companies expectation that we could report on any component of our business within moments of a request…remember garbage in is garbage out.  If the data was not up to date -- it was not a good thing for the person answering the questions. 

Some sales leaders disliked board meetings…I loved them.  We created standard metrics that we reported on every quarter and we explained why we thought they were important to the business and why the board should care.  We could compare and contrast at every meeting.  A good board slide should allow them to get an accurate understanding of your pipeline and trust the expected outcome based on past results. 

It is funny how predictable our business became…when you are growing so fast many companies don’t see the brick wall that they are going to run into … we noticed walls before they were made of brick and plowed right through the clouds to great heights.

By the way it was not just sales – Beth White our Marketing VP was incredible at understanding the impact of every press release, trade show, email blast.  Engineering lead by Dan McGee watched support metrics, bug counts, escalations.  Numbers and data are a great equalizer and a good source of “truth”.

Measure yourself – you may find out how to grow!