Measurement is Highly Overrated

You may have heard the sentiment that you can only improve what you measure, which I think most people would agree to be true.  But another great axiom is that measuring everything is like measuring nothing.  Organization’s can be guilty of measuring so many things that most employees (other than salespeople) become confused as to which measures are reflective of their performance. 

Clear measures help people move toward a goal, giving them tangible feedback on their performance.  People will focus on what you measure, so it’s important to spend a sufficient amount of time determining what those measures should be and getting the employee’s input and buy-in to those measures. 

The following three qualities are important to consider when defining measures for your business. 

1)      Evaluate the measure to insure it’s evaluating the correct behavior.  Think about the most basic purpose of the process and see if the measure is reflecting that purpose.

2)      Measures that use ratios are generally more meaningful than absolute values and a relative measure provides a more useful comparison over time.

Measures should be reflected as trended data because the meaning is much greater.

Selling Strategically Requires Knowing All the Buying Influences

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

Back in 1987 when I was District Systems Manager for a Fortune 100 technology company, I made one of the largest sales of my professional career worth about $500,000 to a bank in St. Louis.  We pulled out all the stops to win the account, including flying the client to our headquarters on the corporate jet (it was the eighties after all and companies still did that). 

The interesting thing about winning that sale was that my primary competitor focused their sales efforts on the executive level at the bank.  While I had created relationships with the executives, I focused the majority of my time defining our proposal/solution to a manager within the end user department of the bank who would be using our system.

As it turned out, upper level management relied more heavily on the recommendation of their internal subject matter expert than they did the outside professionals that had been ‘wooing’ their business. 

That sales experience taught me several valuable lessons about selling: 1) You can never assume you’ve ‘won’ a deal just because you have good relationships with the owner/upper management, 2) Sometimes a technical person who can’t officially say “yes” to your proposal, does in fact have the authority to say “no” and 3) You need to be strategic about how you work with potential clients understanding that in a complex sales cycle, multiple buyers will be involved and will have input into the final decision.

Creating a Blueprint for Growth: It All Starts With a Clear Vision

Photo by Jose Soriano on Unsplash

The saying, “begin with the end in mind” is never more appropriate then when creating a blueprint for growth for your organization.  Terminology in planning exercises can be confusing, but in order to arrive at your vision, all you need to do is answer the question, “what are we building?” 

If you think about describing what that picture looks like in your mind as you look out over the horizon at your business three years from now, what do you see?  How would you describe it?

A good framework for the vision statement is to identify the geographic scope of the organization, size in terms of revenue and/or people, and a description of what the organization will provide. 

Having a concrete, succinct vision statement is a critical step in the planning process.  It identifies that future point in space and time to which everyone in the organization is moving towards.  If the vision isn’t clearly defined, or everyone has a different idea of the vision, than decision making will reflect that confusion. 

Effective Performance Management Must be a Continual Process

Photo by Steve Shreve on Unsplash

The term Performance Management means different things to different people.  For some organizations, Performance Management is synonymous with Performance Review which is most often a yearly process of reviewing an employee’s accomplishments and assigning ratings based on pre-determined categories.

Performance management is a broad term coined by Dr. Aubrey Daniels in the late 1970s to describe a technology for managing behavior and results; two critical elements of what is known as performance.  Effective Performance Management involves continual measurement and coaching to ensure that goals are being met. 

Improving an organization’s performance then requires that employees at all levels receive consistent feedback on their results and the behaviors they’re utilizing.  Receiving feedback mid-stream provides the opportunity to refine the approach and align systems.  Providing only a yearly retrospective on performance, means that many organizations are missing the opportunity to effectively manage and improve performance.

Measurement is Powerful

Measurement is not new…it has been around since the beginning of time.  The sophistication of measurement has grown and improved as time has progressed.  David Landes said, “It can be persuasively argued that improvements in the measurement of time were the most important physical advances in the history of Western Civilization, without which few of the other advances would have been likely.”  In fact, all scientific and industrial progress has been dependent on increasingly more refined measurement tools. 

Although at times we may wish that the measurement of time weren’t so precise and always ‘in our face’, it is true that without that frame of reference, other measurements would be meaningless. 

What makes measurement so powerful is its ability to instigate action--to propel people to move forward and make progress.  As Louis Pasteur said, “A science is as mature as its measurement tools.”  Its interesting then how much more advanced the use of measurement is in the scientific arena as compared to business.  We have the technology.  We understand the importance.  Why aren’t we using measurement more effectively in our businesses?