- What's up? Dan Martell here.
Serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy and
in this video I want to talk about creating a killer
scorecard for you to hold your team accountable
and crushing goals. It's way easier than you think.
This is going to be the most impactful thing you've ever
deployed to your business.
It's gonna give you clarity.
It's gonna feel awesome and then be sure to stay to the end where
I share my Weekly Sync strategy, a download,
a framework, process, a checklist for you to run your
weekly meetings to keep everybody on the same page.
And what's cool is in there is the scorecard that
I'm gonna teach you today.
So be sure to stay to the end and I'm gonna tell you how to
get a copy of that.
(upbeat music)
So when I was growing my company Spheric we were about
16 employees, almost a couple million in revenue and
I realized that I was running this company ass backwards.
I mean the truth was that everybody reported to me which
meant that their to-do list was my to-do list.
I spent most of my time trying to grow the business.
Hiring people, closing new deals,
on boarding, training people and at the same time trying to
ensure that everybody's work was done at a quality level to not
embarrass me as the owner.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night trying to
remember did I ever send that invoice or did that person ever
pay me or did I ever get that employment contract signed
and I just felt ridiculously overwhelmed.
I mean the truth was I had to imagine at that point other
companies at scale did not run their business that way.
Like it was very ad hoc reactive to the situation
and I did like most challenges that came up in
my life is I turned to books and I started reading things
like The Four Disciplines of Execution
and Balanced Scorecards and many other
incredible business leaders in their strategies.
And what I came up with was what I believe to be the most
simplified scorecarding system for companies at scale.
There's five core principles that I want to share with you
that are present in this scorecard format that will help
you get clear, hold people accountable,
and honestly build momentum and growth in your business.
Number one, funnel metrics.
If you think about the things you're gonna measure,
okay, this could be everything from website visitors to contact
form completions to sales calls to eventually deals closed to
customer satisfaction to all kind of the different numbers
that you'd want to know about your business.
Think about it this way.
If I went away on a desert island and I could only get a
one page report about my business's health,
what would I want to see on that report?
Well, the way I think about that is I look
at the funnel of numbers.
'Cause it's always, you know if you think about it like top of
funnel is kind of the activity like social marketing,
inbound marketing, traffic to your website.
You know maybe events that you attend if you're a speaker,
whatever it is.
There's stuff you do to get awareness in the market.
Then there's the conversion tool or the sales strategy that you
just take from that awareness or opportunities that show up and
convert them into customers.
'Cause that's kind of like another step in the funnel.
Then after that there's well, I got the contract then I got to
do the work and how happy is the customer
and monitoring that process.
And then finally, you know at the end of it,
how much revenue did I generate?
How much did it cost me to generate that revenue and
did I make any profit?
So if you think about that it's the bottom of the funnel.
Most entrepreneurs when I ask them if they have a scorecard
and they say yes and I say, "Show me the numbers,"
it's all over the place.
There's like 50, either there's like two or there's 50 and
they're not in any specific order so the big idea,
number one is funnel metrics meaning lay out
your metrics in a spreadsheet.
So always put the numbers on the left side and then the date
ranges as columns so that you can kind of see how the activity
at the top slowly impacts the middle and at the bottom and
are you making any money?
So those are the funnel metrics.
It's different for every business but at a high level
just want you to order them in that strategy so you can get
clarity of how they all kind of roll down to
the bottom of profit.
Number two, weekly measurement.
Every week we sit down and we review our scorecard as a team.
That means that not matter what datapoint we're measuring,
we want to get the current number for
that week and that date.
So we want to see it, we plot it on the spreadsheet.
This is not fancy scorecards on a TV screen.
This is literally a spreadsheet and we update it and that way we
have a cadence of every week of measuring our progress.
Too often entrepreneurs wait. I mean most of them, 98%,
they wait to the end of the year,
They get a report from their accountant and
they decide to go have a drink.
They're either gonna drink 'cause they had an incredible
year or they're gonna drink because they had a crappy year.
But what I want you to do is get in the habit
of taking 52 shots on goal.
That means that every week for every data point that you're
measuring your funnel metrics,
you're looking if you made progress.
And what's great is if you have crazy aspirations,
and I don't know how you're gonna hit your numbers.
If you want to, you know, 5X, 10X your growth in
the next 12 months, you need to measure weekly to know
if you're on track.
And that to me is a discipline.
As a team we sit down and we review it so we can make sure we
can realign in strategies or tactics that may not be
supporting the outcomes that we want to achieve.
So weekly measurement is a must.
Number three, net new numbers or ratios.
Essentially what it is is the numbers you measure on a weekly
basis isn't the total volume or the cumulative number.
It's the net new created in that seven-day window.
Meaning how many people visited our site in the last seven days?
How many new leads did we add to
our marketing funnel in the last seven days?
How many deals have we close in the last seven days?
How much revenue did we invoice in the last seven days?
It's always the net new number and it's not a total because
what happens is it's kind of the psychological effect where we
have a thermostat in our mind and if we look at numbers and
they're going up, as they would every week,
you should be doing something, if they feel good we actually
slow down our focus and aggressiveness
on fixing the number.
But, check this out, if you're a sales guy and you're just
looking at total sales for the quarter then at a certain level
you're gonna feel pretty good at yourself.
But if you actually looked at the effort or the outcome the
last seven days and it's a big goose egg,
a doughnut, a zero, you're gonna go,
"Well shit, I did a bunch of stuff last week and it didn't
"show up in anything for my sales number."
So as a team you don't want to measure the total number for a
month or a quarter or a year, you want to track the net new
activity or you want to create a ratio which might take a couple
other data points and looked at that ratio as a data point
and how does that look over time.
So that is a huge opportunity to clear up the numbers
and focus on the right things.
Is only track the net new outcomes of the activity
in the previous seven days in your scorecard.
Number four, targets and actuals.
If you're tracking every week and you don't have a target for
the month then you're missing a incredible opportunity
to keep the team accountable.
Look, if you do this, if you negotiated,
"Hey, what are we gonna do in the next quarter," with your
team and they set the targets and then every month you track
the target for the month in the actual.
So this is the number you said.
Every metric, every funnel metric,
lead gen, website traffic, sales volume,
revenue, profitability, net promoter score,
I mean you can Google the metrics that you want to monitor
for your business.
But if you have the targets and then you have the actual,
'kay, which is how are we doing average?
It might be an average, it might be a total,
whatever for the month then you know if you're two weeks into
the month and you only have two weeks left that you should be at
50% of that number so you can see the difference side by side.
It's like if the number's supposed to be 100 for the month
and you're at 20 and you're halfway through the month,
there's no way unless you change something and you focus on it
and you invest in it and you sit down as a CEO with your team and
say, "Hey, this is not on track.
"What are we going to do to fix it?"
Because here's the big idea, 'kay?
If you miss a number on one week and you still want to hit your
target for the month, you gotta make it up the next week.
If you miss it for the month,
you gotta make it up the next month.
Most entrepreneurs set such aggressive goals that if they
start to slip there's no way they're gonna catch up.
So you can not take your eye off of the target or the actual for
that period and I'm recommending weekly.
Number five, assign ownership to the funnel metrics.
The reason why we want to do this is if you're the CEO
like I was when I was building Spheric
and you feel accountable for everything.
Nobody cares about my business and I always have to check on
people and all this stuff, it's 'cause you haven't given them
the accountability to update the number and own the numbers.
You might've said, "Hey, I want you to do this."
And they're like, "That's great, I know what you want but I may
"not be able to do that." Right?
'Cause a lot of people are like, "Well how do I compensate?"
Or, "How do I encourage people in sales or customer success
"when there's no quota or commission structure?"
Look, humans are simple.
We want to know how the game is played,
how do we score a goal and how are we doing in that game?
So if you give them the score and you monitor their
performance, they will self-adjust.
If they said, "Look, I'm gonna do 100 sales this month," and
halfway through the month they're at 30,
they will fix their activities to adjust and make sure they
make up the missing numbers to hit the
numbers at the end the month.
'Cause here's the cool part, is everybody on the team knows.
And what I do is I assign those numbers to the person
responsible for updating it.
So before our weekly meeting, our Weekly Sync which I'll share
with you in a second, everybody goes and updates,
grabs the numbers from these different systems and updates
the spreadsheet so that they know their number.
So most people don't even know their numbers and then they're
accountable to it 'cause they updated it and then in team
Weekly Sync you review them as a group so you create this
beautiful thing called positive peer pressure.
Where the peers, their leadership team,
their other folks on their team are holding them accountable to
their numbers because they reported and if they losing or
missing or slipping then the rest of the team will be like,
"Hey, that's not cool because you not hitting your marketing
"targets is affecting my sales opportunities
"and we need to adjust that."
So make sure you assign ownership of the metrics to
individuals that should own those within your company and
ideally per category, not individual numbers.
Somebody should own customer success.
Somebody should own sales.
Somebody should own marketing.
So quick recap on creating a killer scorecard.
Number one, funnel metrics.
Make sure you list the metrics on the left side of your
spreadsheet sorted by top of funnel,
mid funnel, bottom of the funnel
and then operational or finance numbers.
Number two, weekly measurement.
Every week your team should update those numbers.
Three, net new or ratios.
Don't put totals or cumulative numbers.
Put the new activity for that week.
Four, targets and actuals.
Know where you're going, how are we measuring on our way there on
a monthly and quarterly basis and adjust accordingly.
And five, assign ownership.
Everybody on your team that's responsible for a project or an
outcome should own the number associated to it
and that is how you keep accountability, clarity,
and a high performing team executing.
So as I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
I want to share with you the Weekly Sync agenda structure
that I use to run my team meetings every week.
I mean it is the most comprehensive focused
and high output team structure.
Every week I have things like customer headlines.
We talk about issues, we talk about our scorecard.
Hence why I wanted to share this framework with you.
We talk about the big rocks that we need to execute but we do it
in a very structured way that gets us in and out.
Everybody synced up and executing for the week.
So you can click the link below to download your copy today and
if you liked this video, I'd encourage you to click the like
button, subscribe to my channel and be sure to share this video
with a friend and also leave a comment.
Let me know out of these strategies I mentioned,
what one thing out of the scorecard strategy were you not
doing that you're gonna change in the way you measure today.
I'd love to hear below in the comments.
As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
Perfect, cool.