Forty widgets, no answers
Early-stage founders either fly blind or drown — no reporting at all, or a dashboard with forty widgets nobody interrogates. Both fail the same way: when something breaks in the funnel, you find out a quarter late.
The working alternative is a short list of numbers you read every week, in the same order, and one rule: any number that moved sharply gets a why before the meeting ends.
The five
- New leads by source. Track them by source rather than in total, because totals hide the story. If events doubled and inbound halved, “leads are flat” is a false comfort.
- First-touch time. Median hours from lead creation to first human or sequence contact. This is the cheapest number to improve and the most predictive of reply rates. If it’s over a day, fix this before touching anything else.
- Stage conversion, one stage only. Pick your leakiest handoff — usually meeting-to-proposal or proposal-to-verbal — and watch just that rate. Watching every stage at once means noticing nothing.
- Weighted pipeline vs. target. The forecast, honestly weighted, against what you need to book this quarter. This number is only as good as your pipeline hygiene, which is exactly why reading it weekly enforces the hygiene.
- Slipped deals. Count of deals whose close date moved out this week. One slip is a deal. A cluster of slips is a market signal, a pricing problem, or a stage-definition problem — and it’s the earliest warning you’ll get.
Ten minutes, same time, out loud
The format matters more than the tooling. Read the five numbers at the same point in the weekly sales meeting, out loud, with last week’s beside them. The moment a number needs a spreadsheet excavation to produce, it stops being read — so they must come straight off the CRM, live, no export step.
If your CRM can answer “what changed this week?” in plain English, even better. The habit matters more than the report: ask why while the answer can still change the quarter.
