Our fears and concerns about accountability are well founded. After all, measurements expose us to how well or how poorly we are performing at any given moment. For the person being scrutinized, it can be quite overwhelming. At one end of the spectrum, we fear being judged or exposed as a fraud or failure. At the other end of the spectrum, we feel like tracking everything is a tedious waste of time and means we’re going to be micromanaged or controlled. But the right type of measurement should not produce any of these issues.

Doing Enough of the Right Things

If you translate the concept of measurements into our normal, everyday lives, you’d realize we have progress indicators built in to our society. Gauges like speed limits and income brackets tell us where we should be and how we stack up against others. We even have a holiday (New Year’s Day), around which we set resolutions. So in our day-to-day lives, we set goals for a day, month or quarter so we can track whether or not we are making progress.

It is inherent in each of us to assess our successes and learn from our failures. We set goals so we can feel good about ourselves, and how we use our allotted time. Likewise, if we don’t have a way to determine effectiveness, we end up feeling like we’ve wasted our time. If you chained enough small daily goals together, you soon would be doing enough right things to make your month or year effective.

Do MORE, MORE, MORE: Metrics versus Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

What is the difference between metrics and KPIs? Off the top of my head, I can list over 50 potential metrics that a company can use to track and forecast revenue health and production rates. That would be very overwhelming and hard to view in a dashboard. Collecting data for data’s sake equates to wasted money and resources for any company.

However, you don’t have to measure all of this. There are only five or six KPIs you should review in order to successfully monitor the health of your revenue systems. The other piece that confuses many people, is the correct KPI may not be in absolute numbers like $ closed or number of leads obtained. Many times, the wrong KPI gets measured in absolute numbers and causes people to focus on the wrong outcomes. We all have the same amount of time and can only do so much. Many of the right KPIs should be measured in relative numbers like a percentage to closing ratio, talk to set ratio or discovery meeting to win ratio.

Doing Right Things Correctly

The correct KPIs will tell you if you are doing enough of the right things to get to your goals. Notice that most goals are lagging indicators to the outcome you want. The problem with only measuring outcomes is that they don’t tell you how you got to the goal. A proper KPI, a leading indicator, may tell you that you are doing enough (e.g. “I attended 74 discovery meetings this quarter”). But how do you know that you did the right things during the quarter? By using a KPI like: discovery meetings to win ratio, I can measure how well I do in discovery and closing. If I win 47 deals from 74 discovery meetings, I have a 63.5 percent conversion rate. Percentage is a measure of doing the right things or the wrong things.

As you can see, it’s about shifting your focus. You don’t need to do more. In fact, you probably need to do less – but do it with intention and a proper concentration on the right measurements. This is the only way to truly track your progress, and have a chance of replicating your successes once you find out what works.