The report nobody reads, and the one they do

There is a version of reporting that exists to show effort. It is long, it arrives monthly, it has a chart for every metric available, and it is skimmed for the one number that decides whether the meeting is comfortable.

It also cannot be acted on, because it does not distinguish between the numbers that describe the business and the numbers that describe the work.

01Report the funnel, in order

Volume out. Replies. Meetings booked. Meetings held. Proposals. Five numbers, in sequence, against the volume that produced them. Read that way, the stage that is not moving names itself, and that stage is the week's work.

• Same rows, same order, every week, so the eye can compare without effort
• Volume alongside every rate, because a rate without a denominator is a mood
• One line on what changed since the last one
• One line on what changes before the next one

02Weekly, not monthly

A month is four chances to correct something, taken as one. By the time a monthly report says a stage is broken, it has been broken for four weeks and the fix competes with everything else that surfaced in the meantime.

The point of measuring is not to know. It is to change one thing, then find out whether that was the right thing.

03One change at a time

The temptation, when a week is bad, is to change the list and the message and the offer at once. The following week will then be better or worse and you will not know why, which means you have spent a week and learned nothing.

A report built this way takes ten minutes to read and produces a decision. That is the only test worth applying to it.