It’s clear that activity drives results—or at least it should. We all know that orders and revenue is a trailing metric. The danger of focusing on end results is that by the time you can report them, it’s too late to do anything about it.
If you focus only on making the number, at the end of the month, quarter, year, you’ve missed it, there are no do-overs. You can only look to recovering in future periods – but then it’s too late, you’ve missed your goal.
As a result, we want to find the leading indicators/activities that produce the results we expect. We start looking at things like pipeline metrics, meetings, proposals, prospecting calls, and so forth.
We identify these metrics by walking backwards in the buying/selling process. What are the key activities that drive orders? What are the activities that drive those prior activities, and so forth up to, how many people/organizations do we need to be engaging to produce our numbers.
It sounds logical, makes sense. But somehow, too often, we lose the connection between activity, outcomes, results. Soon we start looking at activity for activity sake–and there is no connection with the results they produce.
I could go on, but you get the point. Activities are only meaningful when they are done in the context of results that need to be created. We constantly need to be examining the whole activity chain to see if the activities are producing what’s needed. We can’t arbitrarily declare activity levels, without understanding their connectivity to the results. We have to constantly be assessing and re-engineering the activity chain, not seeking more activity, but tilting the numbers in our favor so we are doing the right activities.
Dave has spent his career developing high performance organizations. He worked in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments. His consulting clients include companies in the semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, computer, telecommunications, retailing, internet, software, professional and financial services industries.
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