🔦 Spotlight - Measuring BizOps success

And how to find hares, not tortoises, in the field of business KPIs

During a recent chinwag with fellow BizOps folk, someone asked: “How do we measure BizOps success?” An excellent question, and I don’t say that just because most people take time to answer, but because it is one that resurfaces more and more often. After all, BizOps doesn’t have its own tidy set of metrics that it naturally “owns.” Marketing can bang on about MQLs, Sales tracks Pipe Gen, Finance obsesses over Burn… But BizOps? Cue puzzled expression. 🤷🏽‍♂️

BizOps’ impact can be perceived to be as mysterious as Love in Interstellar

Some have likened BizOps success to that ineffable notion of “Love” in Interstellar—yes, the film where Love breezily transcends across time and space, stronger than gravity and apparently immune to normal laws of physics. Much like the feelings exhibited by numerous characters in the movie:

• Love spurs action: Cooper’s desperate to get back home.

• Love transcends dimensions: Cooper and Murphy talk through a cosmic tesseract as if it’s a Sunday afternoon phone call (or text if you prefer to text. I do).

• Love guides intuition: Dr Brand’s hunch about heading to Edmund’s planet proves spot-on.

Granted, Love isn’t something you can neatly plot on a spreadsheet. And so it appears that neither does BizOps’ success! But that’s not the whole story.

“Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful; it has to mean something… Maybe it’s some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive” - Dr Brand, Interstellar

In truth, I generally agree that BizOps wins when everyone else wins. We bolster every metric in the company. We’re not here to big up MQLs if they don’t turn into Pipe Gen; or to big up Win Rates, if that ACV is dropping like flies for no good reason; and we don’t care about Booked revenue (well, not really), if that cash never landed in the company account—because that would stall the ARR nevertheless.

Remember, we’re all in service of ARR. We are in service of the company. But attributing - any department, or individual’s - contribution to a BIG metric like ARR, is of the hardest things to do, and quite frankly often not possible, reliable, or accepted. Even Amazon needs a whole team of PhDs so attempt this. What makes you think a start up could do it?

Trouble is, if BizOps is seen as some mysterious force—a bit like Love in Interstellar —it’s easily overlooked. BizOps teams can be consigned to the shadows, or even made to be ‘invisible’… and then forgotten. 🫥 (anyone else heard from a CEO that “when Ops works, it is invisible?” Cue heavy death knells.)

Leading > Lagging

The problem with measuring success only by the BIG metrics, is that pretty much all company metrics that investors and the SLT care about are lagging indicators of success. 🐢 And lagging indicators are just that → lagging = slow. They are in my rear view mirror.

What I need is metrics that drive focus, and urgency. Metrics that help me run a team. Metrics that shorten the feedback loop.

So I pick a few leading indicators of success 🐇, focused on the specific parts of the business my team is able to influence. Then design initiatives to address those and improve the metrics.

For example, I once zeroed in on the contract formalisation stage of the sales funnel, suspecting it was taking longer than necessary. Through a series of efforts to instil standardisation, data integrity, new (or creative use of) tools, and sales enablement, I managed to cut that time in half. I picked on a specific part of the process, measured a handful of KPIs to understand the performance, and then optimised for the one metric that mattered - speed.

Leading indicators are useful for three reasons:

Focus – Monitoring a specific area keeps everyone’s attention on what really counts. Compliance might track phishing success rates (i.e., who clicked), whereas a nascent DealDesk function measures contract review speed. Each team knows precisely where to look and how to tell if it is going up, down or sideways.

Short feedback loop - You can learn from the metric and how to improve it quickly. Say you are improving the speed of Customer Support. Usually you can do something to help a CS person respond 50% faster to one type of query. Then you can add another, and another and another, and before you know it, your CS response time is cut in half. The key is finding that short feedback loop and acting on it.

Scalability - The last reason is obvious if your company is going strong and you are growing fast. If you measure parts of the process and performance, you can easily transfer responsibility to the new people hired on the team. As they take ownership of those responsibilities they (and you!) already have the yardstick for performance.

📝 I will stick a couple of examples of ‘stuff’ you can measure right now, at the bottom of the article.

Final word

BizOps success needn’t be as elusive as Love’s gravitational pull in Interstellar. You simply need the right focus on leading indicators—going for hares, not tortoises—and a dash of everyday pragmatism. Because in the end, not unlike true Love, BizOps is about delivering real impact rather than basking in mystique.

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📝 Bonus

Some ‘stuff’ you could measure:

• Sales Efficiency – Pick a step, the one that would have outsized effect on the amount of $ you close. Measure the time taken from e.g. contract initiation to Formalisation. If this decreases, BizOps is improving deal velocity. Note, if you decide to pull contract initiation to an earlier step in the funnel, know how the definition of Formalisation will change.

• Customer Activation Rate – Track how new customers engage with your product or service after signing up, and what the impact on revenue is. Run regressions on which part of the experience affects your commercial targets. Find the behaviours most closely associated with speed and volume of transactions.

• Data Accessibility – Monitor how often business intelligence dashboards or reports are accessed by teams, indicating the effectiveness of BizOps-driven insights. I once measured the time to create a report. I took 20 different reports created by the same person in the span of a few days. Average it out. Here is a base metric. (you can also pick a median if that’s more representative for your case). You can also measure how much % of data you have duplicated and aim to reduce that to 0.

• Forecast Accuracy – Compare predicted revenue outcomes against actuals to gauge the reliability of strategic planning. Note that if you are doing B2B Enterprise only, this might be a tad tricky and not as useful on a monthly basis. Useful on a Last 3 Months trailing basis though.

• Process Automation Impact – Measure the reduction in manual work through automation initiatives, showcasing operational efficiency improvements. Often you’d have to rely on anecdotal evidence, but if your platform can provide the usage data, it can be gold.

• Cross-Team Alignment Score – Survey internal teams on clarity of strategy and priorities, reflecting BizOps’ role in breaking silos and aligning execution. This one could be a good measure if the BizOps team has good company-wide visibility. Because if you rely on other leaders to do the repeat repeat repeat work for you, it can be tricky to execute.