Most sales reviews are about one kind of number. The one you can no longer change.
Sell-out, market share, target achieved. By the time you see them, the month has closed. You can explain them. You cannot change them.
Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard separates these outcome measures from the things that drive them. Lagging indicators tell you the score. Leading indicators tell you what is likely to happen next.
In a field team, the leading ones are things like:
- Are the key doctors being seen?
- How often?
- Which skills am I actually seeing on double visits?
You can see all of these during the month, while there is still time to act. That is what makes them useful.
The trap is simple. If you manage only the lagging number, every conversation with a rep is about the past. The rep leaves knowing they missed, but not what to do on Monday.
So I review both, but I start with the leading ones.
One caution. Leading indicators only matter because they drive results. A rep with perfect activity and no movement in sales is telling you something too, usually about the message.
“Sales tell you what happened. The field tells you what will.”
Lesson 7 of 13 in Step 2: Targets, forecasts and numbers, with the full guide and a checklist for this week.