🔦 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. 🤷🏽♂️
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.