CHAPTER 5
Scorekeeping
Measurement drives execution. It is the anchor of reality. To create your best results, you will need to track your 12 Week Year results daily, weekly, and monthly! Without measurement, there is no way to react quickly enough when things are not working to ensure that you hit your 12 week goals. Measurement tells you how you are doing—how your actions are impacting the world. Without effective metrics, you lack the important information you need to make intelligent business decisions. To make the 12 Week Year work for you, you will need to measure both lead and lag indicators. Lead indicators are measures that show early progress toward the end result, while lag indicators often are the end results. When you realize that a single week is the equivalent of a month in a 12 Week Year, the need to track lead and lag measures is apparent—a week lost is a month lost—track your numbers! Step One is to develop a set of key measures that are a mix of lead and lag indicators. An example of a good mix of lead and lag measures for a sales goal might be referrals (lead), inquiries (lead), sales in dollars (lag), units sold (lag), and units ordered (lag). Lead and lag measures are important, but don’t get carried away with too many metrics. Pick just the top one or two of each for you to track. If you want to lose weight, a great lead indicator might be the number of hours that you exercise each week. A great lag indicator might be waist size or pounds lost. By tracking these indicators, you can determine each week if you are on track to hit, or miss, your goals. Capture the Lead and Lag measures for each of your goals below: Goal One: ______________________________________________________ Goal Two: ______________________________________________________ Goal Three: _____________________________________________________ We recommend that you track lead and lag numbers weekly and make them visible in a place that you (and your team, if you have one) see them often. Many of our clients use white boards to do this. Figure 5.1 shows a sample white board. Figure 5.1 An example of recording lead and lag numbers. At the top of the example, the weekly execution score and a lead indicator (opening meetings with prospects) are tracked. At the bottom of the board a lag measure (closed sales measured in dollars) are tracked. By tracking these numbers, you know where you are every week. Step Two is to track how well you execute your tactics each week. In addition to your other key measures, it’s critical that you also measure your execution effectiveness. Establishing a metric that allows you to know each week how well you executed your tactics is essential. This is because you have more control over your actions than you do your outcomes. Your 12 week outcomes are created by your daily and weekly actions. To determine your weekly execution score, calculate the percentage of tactics that were due in a given week that were completed. If you have 10 tactics due, and you executed 8 of them, your score is 80% that week. Step Three is to pay attention. Each week, take some time to review your metrics. Are there any performance breakdowns? Are you making good progress on your lead indicators? Are your lag indicators on pace to hit your 12 week goals? What do you need to do to keep up the momentum or to get back on track? Once you have determined your metrics and are tracking them weekly, here are some tips to make your metrics work for you: If you score your execution each week, and you track your weekly lead and lag metrics for each of your goals, the 12 Week Year provides you with everything that you need to get better each week. Your weekly number will create one of four different scoring scenarios: Measurement allows you to stay on track and focus on your most important activities each day of your 12 Week Year. Each of the scenarios above require you to take different actions to maximize the likelihood of hitting your 12 week goals. The following sections provide more details about each scenario. You are executing the tactics in your plan (80% + ) and your plan tactics are working (your lead and lags are on pace to hit your goal.) This is the scenario you want every week. If you are in this situation in week 12, it means that you have hit your goals and have had a great 12 weeks! When you are scoring well and are on track to hit your 12 week goal, the actions for the upcoming week are simply to keep executing! It is important to not get complacent in this scenario. Sometimes you can start to coast when things are going well. You get comfortable, take your foot off the gas, and your momentum stops. It is harder to get back up to speed after you slow down than it is to keep up a steady productive pace. This scenario can be frustrating and even a bit demoralizing. You had the best of intentions, yet you just are not executing the tactics in your plan at a level that drives the results you are shooting for. Often the first inclination in this scenario is to change your plan. But that is the wrong answer! You don’t know if your plan works yet, because you are not working the plan. The second common temptation in this scenario is to abandon your plan and the 12 Week Year with it, because, after all, you weren’t doing so badly before. This is the worst approach. It is the only action that will guarantee your failure to hit your 12 week goals. Instead, review the performance breakdown and what to do about it—the focus here is on your tactical execution. Once you ID the tactic, or tactics, that are not executing or avoiding, recommit to executing those tactics this week and to scoring 80%. Here are some questions that may help you: If you are executing at 80% or more but not moving your lead and lag measures at the pace needed to hit your 12 week goals, you are in an excellent position to get better results quickly. The hard part of the weekly execution process is usually scoring well on your tactics. To score well most often requires work and a willingness to be uncomfortable. Your weekly score shows that you are willing to work your plan, but your plan isn’t working. If you are not inflating your score, your lead metrics have had sufficient time to respond, and you are not consistently avoiding a specific tactic, the required action is to modify your plan so that when you execute it going forward, it delivers the results that you are expecting. Perhaps you need to increase activity, perhaps you need to refine your technique so that your process is more productive (add tactics to work on your sales talk, change up your work-out, carve out more time for coaching, and so on.) The 12 Week Year is a learning system. And as adults we learn by iteration (trial and error.) You set a 12 week goal, you built a plan that you thought would work, and you executed it. Your results are less than what you need, so back to the plan you go! If you change your plan, one of two things will happen: your changes will bear fruit and you will begin making sufficient progress on your goal, or you still are not seeing sufficient progress on your lead and lags. If you are making sufficient progress, great! If not, keep tweaking your plan until it delivers. This requires a willingness to work through the problem, but if you don’t give up, you will reach a breakthrough moment. The only failure is giving up. This is an unusual situation. You aren’t working your plan (unless you are being too hard on yourself when you score,) but you are still hitting your goals. Generally, there is one of three reasons for this outcome. The first is you got lucky. Something happened and all, or most, of your results just fell in your lap. Maybe you closed the deal of a lifetime. Maybe someone just showed up and bought all of your inventory, maybe the market is up. In any event, we recommend that you either raise your goal to reflect the lucky event, or mentally take it out of your results so that you are still executing your plan. While luck is great and feels good, it’s not a process, and if you rely on it you are taking a huge risk of future failure. The second reason that this scenario can happen is that your plan is much more difficult than necessary to hit your 12 week goal, but executing it at less than 80% is enough to hit your goal. In this case we recommend that you adjust your plan to make it more in line with what it takes to hit your goal, so that you don’t run the risk of becoming demoralized. The third common reason that scenario 4 arises is that you don’t believe in your plan at all, and you are doing something else entirely that is driving your results. In this case we recommend that you replace the tactics in your plan with your new tactics. In this way, you set yourself up to be even more successful because a written plan is more productive than a plan between your ears, and you can keep tweaking your plan to make it even more effective. Now that we have worked through Process Control and Scorekeeping, as promised earlier, we will explain what we call the Weekly Execution Routine, or WER. The WER is a three-step process that combines elements of Process Control and Scorekeeping and that if applied and fully engaged with, will almost guarantee that you will hit your 12 week goal! Your 12 Week Year Plan schedules your tactics to come due a given week—not in a given day. This is because it generally does not matter if you get a tactic done on a Friday instead of a Tuesday. Rather, the problem arises when you let tactics slip from one week to the next. If that happens too much, you simply are setting yourself up to fail. That’s why the week is the crucible for execution in the 12 Week Year. The WER keeps you on track and moving toward your goals every week. At the end of each week, (or first thing Monday morning) score your week’s execution and update your lead and lag metrics for each of your goals to reflect your results. It’s best to do this before you begin the new week. Scoring will help you to prepare for the Weekly Accountability Meeting (WAM) (see Step 3 below) and to assess areas to focus on in the upcoming week. Maybe there was a breakdown to fix, maybe there was a success to celebrate. Maybe you need to catch up, maybe you need to score better this week, maybe you just need to keep going. Scoring is sometimes a challenge because it’s hard to confront performance breakdowns, but remember that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Scoring not only supports effective execution, it also lets you focus on what’s working and what needs to be improved. A tip here is to prepare a summary of your results so that you are ready to be efficient with your time in the WAM. Another suggestion is to identify successes from the previous week. Once you have completed scoring the previous week, it’s time to create your new plan for the current week. If you are using our online tools on Achieve!, you will score your previous week and print your plan for the coming week. If you are using the paper system, you will create a weekly plan derived from your 12 Week Plan, and include all the tactics due this week plus any undone tactics from last week that must be made up in the current week to hit your 12 week goals. If you have weekly commitments you will include those in your weekly plan as well. Bring your plan and scores to the WAM and be prepared to report out as the CEO of your business and your life. Be sure to include successes, lessons learned, scores, and what is in your plan this week. If you need to execute better this week, let your WAM partners know exactly what you are committed to doing this week to get back on track. If you had any commitments that you made in last week’s WAM, be sure to update the group on your progress. Credit: Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock.com. These three steps of the weekly execution routine are simple and easy. However, it is even simpler and easier not to do them. Commit to applying each of these tools every week this 12 Week Year and you will be amazed at the results. The WER helps you to execute your plan consistently each week of the 12 Week Year. For an even deeper dive into your weekly execution, review Section 12 of this field guide.
THE FOUR WEEKLY EXECUTION SCENARIOS
Scenario 1 (++)
Scenario 2 (– –)
Scenario 3 (+ –)
Scenario 4 (– + )
GREAT WEEK AFTER GREAT WEEK: THE WEEKLY EXECUTION ROUTINE
WER Step 1—Score Last Week
WER Step 2—Write Down or Print Your Weekly Plan
WER Step 3—Attend a WAM
