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Best practices: which metrics to actually watch

Most marketing dashboards have 40 widgets. You need 6 numbers.

Six numbers, watched weekly, beat any 40-widget dashboard.

  1. Lead volume. Total leads this week vs trailing 4-week average.
  2. Lead-to-meeting rate. Quality signal — if leads go up but rate drops, you're bringing in worse leads.
  3. Meeting-to-deal rate. Sales-execution signal. Bottom-quarter reps move this needle most.
  4. Deal size (median). Use median, not average — averages are skewed by outliers.
  5. Cycle time. Days from lead to closed deal. A growing cycle is the leading indicator of revenue trouble.
  6. Customer acquisition cost. Spend ÷ deals, by source. The number that decides where the next dollar goes.

Track these six on one screen. Skip the rest until one of these six raises a question only a sub-metric can answer.

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