Get choosy with your metrics - a marketer’s framework
Your business, your project, your focus - let’s lump these things together, and call them your responsibilities. And your responsibilities - they have inertia. Whether a well-oiled machine, or a stuttering, coughing engine - what you own represents a flywheel built upon your efforts.
You might have heard of a flywheel in the context of business. Typically, a flywheel is represented by a circle, with inputs feeding into it, representing a growth in your business from something. It’s a simply way of visualizing the things you are (or should be!) doing to grow your business.
I thought this was about metrics? 🤨
YES - it is!
The flywheel illustrates the importance of metric selection, and how optimization can create an outsized effect towards your business objectives.
We’ll get to a framework for identifying your metric selection in a moment - but first, we need to baseline the mechanics of you at your company. We’ll be talking about:
the components of a flywheel
what you can influence
And then we’ll delve into the holy grail 🏆 - what your metric selection framework should look like.
Flywheels and measurement - or, the pressure you exert, and where it’s felt.
Let’s construct a hypothetical flywheel below - for our purposes, a flywheel must have certain characteristics to qualify:
A center (AKA fulcrum)
The center is your north star, and it is the reason why your business exists. It’s the revenue, the customer, or employee
Mechanical advantage - the gap between flywheel center and where you apply your force.
Where you apply pressure to your flywheel can let you generate huge amounts of volumes - but these volumes likely have questionable quality for the business’s center
Why is this important to understand? Your flywheel, and the bits and bobs that spin the center, can help you understand what your “one true love” metric should be. They help you identify where your positive pressure is felt the most - and the lineage of that pressure point.
Your flywheel helps dictate what your metric should be. IC’s will have a very different focus versus a founder.
Pitstop: your circle of influence
In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the author challenges readers to apply positive pressure to their circle of influence, and come to peace with their circle of concern; you can do something about the former, but can only wring your hands at the latter.
For the marketer, your circle of influence could be spend allocation by marketing campaign. Your circle of concern could be market turmoil, a buggy software release, or a substandard signup flow
For the founder, your circle of influence may be headcount allocation to marketing vs. engineering. Your circle of concern could be economic volatility, new competitors or a new piece of legislation
A framework
OK, let’s bring it back in - our “one true love” - we need a process to determine whether our metric is resilient enough to be The One. Your metric must:
Reflect the pressure you are able to exert in a meaningful, holistic way
Be within your sphere of influence
Account for your mechanical advantage
As we walk through this framework, we’ll look at each stage through the eyes of a marketer, to demonstrate.
Reflecting pressure
Your metric needs to be measurable, plain and simple.
This means that you, and your organization, need to have a precise way of measuring your pressure. Your metric cannot be hidden behind a black box of logic, and it’s definition should be painfully clear to you and your manager. Bonus points for a metric that is simple to understand, and commonly referenced throughout the organization.
Let’s visualize various pressure points through a traditional marketing funnel, displayed on a line graph. On the far left, we have our top of funnel pressure points - on the far right, we have the very, very bottom (this can also be the center of our flywheel).
The pressure you exert does not need to have a direct lineage to the center of your companies' flywheel. A person who owns a diversity and inclusion program may not be able to showcase measurable impact to company revenue - and that’s ok. That is a limitation of measurement, not of your pressure applied.
2. Your sphere of influence
What can you control? What can you influence? If you can’t do either - it shouldn’t be your metric.
Let’s overlay your ability to influence pressure points. From left to right, your level of control decays into influence, which decays into no control (or very little of it).
Your metric should NOT live in the “out of your control” section. If you can’t control or influence what you are judged against, then you’ll have a hard time showcasing your value and motivating yourself to apply the pressures that you can control.
But where should your metric live, amongst your control and influence?
3. Your mechanical advantage
Does your metric represent quality? It should.
Your metric must represent something of value - either a filtered volume, or a rate that indicates quality. This brings you closer to the center of your companies' flywheel, and helps others understand why the pressure you exert is an important value-add.
Let’s overlay your mechanical advantage.
Again - the far left represents a high mechanical advantage.
If you are a marketer, you can drive impressions all day every day, and HUGE quantities of them. But by itself, impressions don’t mean jack - there’s no way to determine the quality of those volumes.
In the middle, quality becomes evident through attrition, but you also lose mechanical advantage, or the ability to influence large volumes of anything. And on the far right - you have very little mechanical advantage, but extremely high quality.
Putting it all together
Life is balance 🧘♀️, and your metric should be as well. Your metric needs to
Reflect your pressure - clear, simple, understood
Be influence-able - your pressure must have impact
Eliminate mechanical advantage, reflecting quality
The sweet spot is right in the middle of our chart below - a clear pressure point, that is in your sphere of influence but outside of your direct control, with a mechanical advantage of >1 to balance quality and quantity.
Hold up - I’ve got questions 🤔
Why select a metric that is outside your direct control?
This becomes your stretch metric, a reflection of your ability to generate results meaningful to the company - but ALSO your ability to drive alignment with interdependent teams, and push forward projects that you must fight for priority
Why not just pick a metric with 1:1 mechanical advantage?
You need a mix of quantity and quality - if you are trying to optimize a marketing campaign, you can’t optimize off of purchase renewals, even though those were the highest quality. So you pick a signup with active usage, or an MQL
✅ Your ability to influence is tested, not just your ability to control.
ChatGPT - write me an outtro
Why is this so important? Complex business environments move fast; people have short attention spans, and the value you bring needs to be synonymous with your identity at your company. When people think of you, they should associate you with your metric.
This is partially branding, but it’s so much more - if you make yourself synonymous with your metric, then you will increase your sphere of influence, and reap the rewards. If you make New ARR your metric, and people associate you with that metric - people will seek your opinions and thought process when making decisions. Cue feedback loop of increased influence and pressure.
