I continue to be stunned by the dashboards people show me. The variety of things we can track and measure is amazing. Add onto this, much of it is in real time. We no longer have to wait until the end of the week/month to get reports. I reflect back to the “old days,” imagine the stone ages of 10 years ago. Then, we might have had some pipeline reports and manually generated activity reports, and they were seldom in real time.
Today it’s amazing. We can track where our customers/prospects are poking their noses on our websites, even other areas they are researching. We can track everything our people are doing, we monitor each conversation, look at their activities, look at how many bathroom breaks they take (think of the number of person weeks of productivity we lose due to bathroom breaks!).
The dashboards, color code everything for us, so that we don’t even have to figure out the “trouble areas.” Indicators popping out in red show trouble—-we kind of ignore everything else. Sadly, too many of the dashboards are showing “red.”
Sitting in reviews, after expressing my amazement about the richness of the dashboards and how nicely they present the data, generally I find myself asking the questions, “Looks like you are in deep shit, what are you going to do about it?”
And managers go back to their dashboards, turning the dials, saying, “We need more outreach, here’s the number I need each person to hit…. We need more meetings, the data shows we need to increase it to X….. We aren’t getting enough renewals, we need to raise our renewal rate to this……” The dashboards give them all the answers, they quickly text a link to their people to pull up the dashboard with the new goals, saying, “fix this….” Following this, they refresh their dashboards and look for other red indicators, or where they might turn dials.
And the cycle continues, day after day. Our sales dashboards, with all the phenomenal ways they present information, seem to have become the work version of the video games we immerse ourselves in at home.
My friend Barry Trailer has this analogy (paraphrased): It’s kind of like sitting at a game. We can see the score, we can see the data (e.g. 3rd down and 15, 2nd quarter, 59 seconds in the quarter….) All we can do from the sidelines is cheer or boo, depending on our perspectives. Too often, we use our dashboards to cheer or boo our people. depending on what we are seeing.
The problem is, despite all the metrics and indicators we can track in our dashboards, they don’t produce revenue.
Some of the dashboards enable us to drill down into an important area, helping us to better define the issues and potential problems (if we use them).
But the real work is all about understanding what’s causing these metrics. And they require deep dives into the issues, whether it’s a deal or pipeline review with a seller, or the leadership team discussing a performance issue. We need to understand what’s causing them, we need to get the context surrounding it, and we need to figure out what do we need to change/how do we fix this.
Doing this means we have to “roll up our sleeves” working with our people, agreeing on what’s happening and what must be done.
It’s only in taking specific action in what we see, that we correct things and achieve our goals, ultimately driving our revenue, growth, and success.
Afterword: Here is the AI generated discussion of this post. What I found most useful were some of the analogies they used to illustrate the central point. Enjoy!
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