What Reporting Is Actually For
How the “Less Data, More Often” approach can help get you and your team into a better analytical rhythm
Less Data, More Often
About a year ago, we started experimenting with a simpler approach to sales reporting at ParkerGale Capital.
We called our new reporting strategy “Less Data, More Often.”
Our new approach revolved around an easy-to-pull weekly template that emphasized answers to a short list of questions, along with straightforward visualizations of the trends inside the data. One of my CROs started calling it his “5–15” report… As in, 5 minutes to put together, and 15 minutes to digest. I liked that. So did our deal team. And the rest of our portco execs. We’re still using the template — and the philosophy that underpins it — inside our portfolio today.
This week, we decided to share our Weekly Sales Metric Playbook with everyone. In our playbook, we’re including the story of how we arrived at our “Less Data, More Often” approach AND a copy of the exact excel template we use with our companies. We even created a video walkthrough to help you setup your own reporting and interpret what the numbers tell you.
→ You can check out the entire playbook at the download link here.
What Is Reporting For?
Putting our playbook together got me thinking about the role that reporting plays in the first place. Why does this stuff matter? Why is reporting even, like, a thing?
Andy Grove has this great quote on the topic:
“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”
I couldn’t agree more. Producing a weekly report is as much about creating a rhythm as it is about sharing the data. It’s about getting into the groove. It’s about creating a series of “good weeks.”
So what are the qualities of a “good week?”
Here’s my checklist:
- We took some time to set a goal and measure our progress against it. We honestly assessed whether we won or lost. And we asked ourselves why.
- We took a stance on what we gleaned from our reflection, and we made a commitment for what to do next.
- We delivered on that commitment. We gave it a try, knowing that the following week would bring with it a question: “So how did that go?”
You can’t read those bullets without noticing the cyclical, 4-step rhythm they create. Assess, commit, attempt, repeat. What’s the benefit of getting into that kind of rhythm? Imagine that performing one of those “loops” each week yielded a 1% improvement in your business. Imagine you completed one of these loops (and realized the associated improvement) during 80% of the weeks of the year. How big of an improvement would that be?
The mathematical answer? About 50%. This is a different kind of compound interest. How much better could your business get if you improved a process, a skill, hell, your growth rate by anywhere close to 50%? How different would it feel to work for your company? How happy would your investors be?
This is a fun question to ponder. And a worthy thing to work towards.
A simple weekly report plays two roles in this establishing this kind of rhythm. First, it keeps you honest. It established the rubric for how you will assess yourself before you get into the work. It’s much harder to explain results away when you’ve already decided on the scoreboard you’ll use to decide if you’re winning or losing. If self-critique is a necessary component for self-improvement (hint: it is), a good report is an insurance policy on an honest evaluation of how you’re doing. The bar is right there. You decided yourself where to set it a while back. And now we get to see how far we are from meeting it — and more importantly, we get to talk about what we believe will help us get a little closer to our goal.
Second, it creates a forcing function. When I know that my results will be on display the following week, the productive paranoia that every great team possesses (“Hey, we could actually lose if we don’t stay focused here”) manifests almost automatically as our upcoming evaluation looms in the distance. Self-motivation is hard to come by. A good weekly report is the antidote to the inevitable lull that follows a commitment to a good idea. It gives you your second wind. It creates the discipline and motivation that all high-performing teams share — and that we humans are so bad at creating for ourselves.
Final Thoughts
Data is only as good as the conversation it creates.
This “Less Data, More Often” approach — and the rhythm it can help teams get into — was the unlock we needed to simplify our fund’s information diet and start having better, more open conversations with our portfolio company management teams.
I hope it can do the same for you too.
