The scoreboard doesn't tell a football coach what's about to happen.
It tells him what already did.
That's fine at halftime. But in business, if you're waiting for the scoreboard to tell you things are going sideways, you're already behind.
I was reminded of this on a recent RevOps Champions podcast with guest Rob Triggs, a sales transformation coach who spent 27 years in the trenches. Rob started at Xerox and eventually moved to helping companies scale across industries. When asked about data-driven decision-making, he said something that landed hard:
"We can now get ahead of it before the lag indicator tells us: 'this is a bad thing that happened, and it's almost too late to correct it.'"
That line kept coming back to me.
Most of the businesses I talk to are running on lag indicators.
Revenue, close rates, customer churn, deal volume. These are the numbers that show up in the leadership meetings. They're real. They matter. And they're all telling you what already happened.
There's nothing wrong with tracking them. But if they're the only numbers you're watching, you're managing in reverse. Reacting to outcomes instead of shaping them.
The leaders who actually scale, and scale without chaos, are the ones who've built a different habit. They don't just ask "what did we do?" They ask "what does this tell us about what's coming?"
That distinction sounds simple. The operational shift required to live it is anything but.
Mark Roberge, former CRO of HubSpot, has spent years studying this and recently wrote about it in his book, “The Science of Scaling”. His argument is direct: revenue is a result, retention is truth, and predictive indicators are control.
The companies that scale predictably aren't guessing. They're watching a small set of behaviors that tell them, before the revenue line moves, whether the system is working.
What's your version of that?
For a franchise network, it might be how quickly a new location hits its first 30-day performance threshold. For a service business, it might be how many customers achieve a specific outcome in the first 60 days. Whatever the metric, the question is always the same: what behavior today predicts the outcome we care about in 90 days?
If you can answer that, you're not running on the scoreboard anymore.
Here's the harder conversation.
On the podcast, Rob talked about why so many leadership teams still don't have this. And it isn't a data problem. The data exists. Most companies are swimming in it.
It's a relevance problem.
When your team is pulling data out of one system, dumping it into a spreadsheet, and running pivot tables to make sense of it, that work takes time. Often a lot of time. And when the report eventually lands in your inbox, it's already old. So leaders stop asking for it. They make decisions on instinct, or on the last number someone mentioned in a meeting.
That's not a failure of leadership. It's a failure of infrastructure.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Ask any CEO, CFO, or Sales leader how confident they are in their forecast. Really confident. The kind where they'd stake a hiring decision on it, or a manufacturing run, or a staffing plan for next quarter.
Most will pause.
When your systems aren't connected, forecasting becomes a negotiation. The sales leader pulls a number from the CRM. The CFO adjusts it based on history. Someone else is working from a spreadsheet export that's three days old. Everyone's working hard. Nobody actually knows.
When businesses get their systems properly integrated and their data becomes trustworthy, forecasting stops being a source of anxiety and starts being a tool. The CFO can predict cash with real confidence. A manufacturing business can plan its supply chain without building in buffer for uncertainty. A services company can staff to what's actually coming, not to what someone thinks might happen.
That's not a technology story. That's what happens when the right indicators are visible, current, and connected.
Most teams we talk to aren't far from having this. The pieces exist. They just aren't connected yet.
This is a big part of what we help our clients build. Not just a CRM. Not just a dashboard. A revenue operations system where the numbers you actually need to run the business are visible, current, and connected to what matters six months from now, not just last quarter.
If you've been thinking about what that could look like for your organization, I'd be glad to have that conversation. There's a link below to grab some time.
Cheers to seeing what's coming,
Kristin
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Kristin Dennewill
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