How to properly track growth performance

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We need to talk about KPIs; Key Performance Indicators.

When deciding on the metrics to track your organization’s positioning and growth performance, there are a couple of questions you should ask.

But first, bear with me for a short story…

Not everything that can be counted, counts

Last year, a fast growing scale-up in the energy sector asked me to help them bring their Academy to market.

They had already successfully marketed and sold some of their open and on-site courses, but wanted to structure and scale their operations.

Insights in the effectiveness of their marketing and sales efforts were not available. So, one of the first things I did – after we had agreed on our objectives, was set up a dashboard.

The dashboard contained 72 metrics we could track.

When I presented the dashboard to the team, the Academy director said: “These are way too many KPIs. We need less.”

He then explained that he once ran a refinery for a major oil and gas company on only 10 KPIs.

“A KPI should be a meaningful metric,” he said, “One that – on it’s own – indicates where we are and what to do next.”

I very much agreed with him. We ended up tracking 72 metrics each month. But, only reported on the 10 most meaningful ones in our quarterly management reports.

Or, as sociologist William Bruce Cameron said in his 1963 book Informal Sociology: “Not everything that can be counted, counts.” 

Which is especially true in marketing and business development, where we need to be careful not to mistake a platform’s KPIs for our own – as Tom Fishburne states in one of his latests articles.

7 questions to determine KPIs

So, how do you decide on the right metrics to track your organization’s positioning and growth performance?

It helps to ask yourself the following questions:

1) Is the proposed KPI aligned with our strategy?

In other words: Does this metric tell us how far we’ve come in reaching a strategic objective?

When it comes to growth, sales velocity could be a great KPI. It tells you how quickly leads move through your pipeline and generate revenue. It’s calculated as follows:

(Qualified opportunities * Win rate * Average deal value) / Length of sales cycle 

2) Is the proposed KPI actionable?

If the number drops, is there something you can actually do to make it go up again?

Should your sales velocity drop, you could try to get more qualified leads or increase your deal size in order to make it go up again.

3) Does the proposed KPI have an owner?

If the number drops (or rises), someone within your organization should be accountable. But not only that, they should also have the authority to take action.

4) Is the proposed KPI easy to understand?

Can you explain what the metric means and why it’s important to track in half a minute?

5) Can the proposed KPI be tracked with relative ease? 

Sure, if you want to calculate sales velocity, you need quite a bit of data. However, all of that data should be easily available and accessible in existing (ERP / CRM) systems.

6) Is the proposed KPI true?

A vanity metric should never be a KPI. Vanity metrics look and feel good (think: likes, reach, or website visitors), but hardly ever translate into meaningful business results.

KPIs also shouldn’t be perverse incentives. The ones that make you work hard on the wrong things. Like the widely adopted billable hour that is mainly an incentive to… bill more hours – instead of solving challenges as fast as possible.

7) Is the proposed KPI leading or lagging?

A lagging KPI tells you about something that happened. It conforms success or failure. 

And while this is very useful, you also need leading KPIs. The ones that predict future outcomes.

If your sales velocity goes down in the first quarter, you’re more likely to miss revenue targets in the second quarter.

I hope this helps. And, I’m curious to hear how you track your organization’s positioning and growth performance.

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Thank you for reading MBD Spark #100, sent on January 22, 2026.