At this point everyone knows the importance of measurement; it ensures understanding and most importantly growth. However, the debate over what to measure continues now and will continue probably forever. I have my own beliefs about what should be measured, but I will leave those out here. Now, I just want to say that if it is worth measuring, it probably isn’t very easy to do so. We naturally gravitate to big obvious numbers, because, well those are fun and may serve as security blankets. But analytical marketers and salespeople will know that these numbers serve as indicators at best and not real metrics of success. In order to get to the meat, to the real understanding, to the real insights, to the real growth strategies, we need to go beyond surface level metrics. It may be hard and it may be scary, but this is where we will find results. As Seth Godin recently posted:
The weight of a television set has nothing at all to do with the clarity of its picture. Even if you measure to a tenth of a gram, this precise data is useless. Some people measure stereo equipment using fancy charts and graphs, even though the charts and graphs say little or nothing about how it actually sounds. A person’s Klout score or the number of Twitter followers she has probably doesn’t have a lot to do with how much influence she actually has, even if you measure it quite carefully. You can’t tell if a book is any good by the number of words it contains, even though it’s quite easy and direct to measure this. We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it’s pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about. It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don’t measure well by conventional means.
And as one of the great sports movies said it:
“It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.” -Jimmy Dugan, A league of Their Own.
