“If It Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Managed!”

I couldn’t believe I was hearing this again. Perhaps for the thousandth time.

I had been sitting in a meeting with a pretty powerful team. The CFO had invited himself to the meeting to start understanding things and “getting things straight.” As he talked about what his concerns, he paused for a moment.

Then those words came out of his mouth, “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed!”

You can guess where the rest of the conversation devolved to.

I hear it so often, whether delivered by a CFO, CEO, CRO, Rev-Ops, CMO, or a Sales Manager.

I often wonder if they ever stopped to think about what that phrase really means or how dumb it is. The act of determining what we measure, isn’t built on that premise. In fact determining what we measure is an act of judgment. Not supported by other metrics, but an assessment of what’s important.

Someone has to know what matters, before the metric exists.

But now we start to see where the logic starts falling apart in practice. Usually, we haven’t taken the time to figure out what matters, we measure what’s easy to count.

We can count the outreaches, meetings, stage progression, proposals. But do those tell us anything about whether the seller actually understood the customer’s problem. Whether they could engage the customer in a meaningful way, supporting their change initiative.

Too often, measuring the work becomes the substitute for understanding how the work is done. And then we have too many leaders that don’t take the time for that understanding. Their safe escape is “you aren’t hitting your metrics!”

These managers address the problem by introducing sub-metrics. Activity metrics are off, so they start measuring inbound and outbound, dials made, conversations had, first meetings established.

These provide no understanding of why activity is off, they just provide more data.

And we add to this pile by doing the same things across deal management, call execution, pipeline management, and so forth.

And now we have technology to add to that pile. We can measure even more. We can count the number of questions asked in a conversation, we can measure the talk/listen ratios, we can measure the follow up actions. But do we know that we and the customer actually accomplished something that was important to each of us?

Our organizations are drowning in metrics, and we still don’t understand what’s important.

Metrics are important, but only when we see are they are just the starting point. Where we go wrong is when we treat them as the destination. The goal to be achieved.

We feel the more we measure, the greater control we have. But why are we constantly seeing YoY plummeting performance? Whether it’s hitting revenue goals, quota numbers, win rates, sales cycle, customer engagement?

Metrics are lagging indicators. The behaviors and work that produced the metric were done long ago. We have no idea what that was, and what we need to do to change the outcomes, which in turn changes the metric.

The metrics tell you something has happened. The metric is the residue of past action or inaction, good or bad decisions, understanding or the absence of it, connection or the lack of it. The metric says something has happened. It can’t tell you what. It can’t tell you why. It can’t tell you what to do to correct it.

Clearly, by now you can see this rant isn’t about metrics. It’s a statement about management and leadership. Metrics just provide a convenient hiding place.

And the CFO? He wasn’t wrong in wanting to understand what was happening. But the phrase he chose, prevented him from getting the answer.

Metrics become the surrogate for management when management isn’t present.

Afterword: Again, I always love the different twist these AI characters provide in these discussions. Enjoy!