🦮 What Guides You?

How do you measure your success? In other words, where are you focusing your attention?

If you're like most people, you are paying close attention to results like the number of email subscribers you have, the number of sales you make, or how much your traffic has grown over the last year. Those kinds of metrics are easy to measure, exciting to watch, and meaningful, but they have one big drawback: they lag.

Leads Lead Lags

Lag measures are metrics that track what has already happened, or is currently happening, in areas that you cannot directly control. Sure, you can influence these metrics, but you cannot control them. There is no legal way to snap your fingers and double your website traffic, or put in a few extra hours to absolutely guarantee that you will make a few extra sales.

Lead measures, on the other hand, are metrics you can directly control, which typically influence the success of your lag metrics and give you a way to predict your success based on activity over time.

Lead measures are typically less exciting, but more directly related to your day-to-day work. Examples include the number of blog posts you publish, number of podcast episodes, or social media posts. Sales representatives that make a living from lag measures (like the dollar value of sales they make) are known for focusing on lead measures they can control such as the number of sales calls they make per day.

The reality is, you need a mix of lead and lag measures to get a full picture of where your business is at, and how your work relates to your results. So, with that said, what lead measures will you focus on, and which lag measures will you use to measure your success?

Pick 2-3 of each category, and together these 4-6 metrics become your "Key Performance Indicators" or KPIs. Now time to start tracking, and get to work!