From Impossible To Inevitable

Chapter 8What Executives Miss

Are you overanalyzing, or so microfocused on email open rates, webinar attendance levels, or getting your apps configured that you've missed an uber-issue?

When you get so caught up in the day-to-day busy-ness of marketing, lead generation, and app configuration, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees.

When you get so caught up in the day-to-day busy-ness of marketing, lead generation, and app configuration, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees.

Pipeline Creation Rate: Your #1 Leading Metric

One great thing about all the new ways to measure marketing and sales is being able to better See the Future (especially in SaaS businesses). You're trying to gauge whether your revenue will keep growing in the future, even though sales results vary a lot, monthly or quarterly, and sales pipelines have big quality issues.

What's worse, sales numbers are a lagging indicator of all the hard growth work you've done (right or wrong) in the prior 12 or more months—they can't predict anything.

And what about pipelines? It's fun to list every possible company who could buy, but pipeline reports are crap for predicting the future, since they are more often about hope than truth. Pipeline for this month is useful, but still dependent on how various reps estimate (guess) their probability and close dates. Next quarter's pipeline is only slightly better than a guess, even once you get pretty big.

But there's a better metric, your Key Metric, which ...