The problem with most reporting
Most businesses have either no reporting or too much. Both produce the same outcome: decisions made on instinct, and problems discovered a month after they started.
A weekly one-page review with six numbers is enough for most SMEs to run on, provided each number has an owner and a threshold.
The six numbers
1. New qualified leads
Not raw enquiries. Leads meeting your written qualification standard, split by source.
Why weekly: it is the earliest indicator of future revenue. A dip caught this week is a problem you can fix before it reaches the revenue line in two months.
2. Average first response time
The gap between an enquiry arriving and a human replying.
Why weekly: it moves fast, it is entirely within your control, and it has one of the strongest relationships to conversion of any operational metric.
3. Conversion rate to the next stage
Whatever your critical step is — enquiry to consultation, consultation to proposal, proposal to order.
Why weekly: it separates a volume problem from a conversion problem immediately. Falling leads with stable conversion is a marketing issue; stable leads with falling conversion is a sales or offer issue.
4. Revenue booked
New business confirmed this week, not invoiced or collected.
Why weekly: it is the outcome everything else predicts, and reading it weekly keeps the connection between activity and result visible to the whole team.
5. Cost per acquisition
Total acquisition spend divided by customers acquired, by source where possible.
Why weekly: cost drift is gradual and easy to miss monthly. Weekly reading catches a channel degrading before a quarter of budget has gone into it.
6. One quality or delivery measure
Choose the one that reflects whether you are keeping promises: on-time delivery, defect or return rate, project milestones met, response time to support requests, or review rating.
Why weekly: growth built on deteriorating delivery is temporary, and quality problems are cheapest to fix early.
Thresholds turn numbers into decisions
Each metric needs a level that triggers action:
- Qualified leads below X for two consecutive weeks: review campaigns and offer.
- Response time above Y: fix routing this week.
- Conversion below Z: review recent calls and objections.
- Cost per acquisition above target: pause the worst source and diagnose.
Without thresholds, reviews become narration. With them, the review produces decisions.
The meeting that makes it work
Thirty minutes, same time weekly, same six numbers, same four questions:
- What moved, and why?
- What is below threshold?
- What single action will we take this week?
- Who owns it, and by when?
Not a status update. A decision meeting with a short agenda.
What to leave out
- Impressions, reach, and follower counts. They belong in a monthly channel review at most.
- Website sessions in isolation.
- Anything nobody has acted on in the last three months.
- Metrics that cannot be measured consistently, which are worse than no metric because they generate false confidence.
Making the data trustworthy
- Define each metric in writing, once, so it means the same thing every week.
- Assign one owner per number.
- Use one source of truth per metric, ideally the CRM.
- If a number is unavailable, record that rather than estimating. A gap is honest; a guess corrupts the record.
After three months
You will have a trend line rather than a snapshot, and trends are where the real information lives — a slow rise in cost per acquisition, a gradual slide in response time, a seasonal pattern you can now plan around.
That is the point of the discipline. Not the numbers in any single week, but the ability to see the direction while it is still cheap to change.
