Ep 2: What Reporting Is Really For

Paul Stansik: A few years ago, after we exited one of our portfolio companies, I asked our CRO what was the single most helpful thing we did for him. And I figured he’d name a key hire we helped him with, or a sales play we helped him build. But instead he said something surprising. He said, “You made us look at the data every week.”

When we first started working together, he saw that weekly reporting as a tax that he owed his investors. That’s a pretty common perspective. Most operators treat reporting as something they produce for the people who write the checks. It’s a tax that comes with the job. But as he got into that rhythm that the weekly report created, he realized something.

The real value was never in us seeing the report. It was in what the report showed him about his own business. And once he started not only producing that report, but looking at it every week, two things became impossible to ignore. We were leaning too hard on our existing customers and not creating enough new-logo pipeline, and our sellers needed to go back to basics on discovery and demo.

Now, we’d suspected both for months, but the weekly data showed us an unignorable trend that both of those factors were holding us back from hitting our targets. And it gave us the conviction we needed to build a plan and go attack both parts of our sales process. All that enabled by a few simple data points that my CRO started calling his five-fifteen report: five minutes to assemble and fifteen minutes to review.

The report itself didn’t fix anything. Looking at the data every week didn’t create pipeline or make our demos better. What it did was surface what needed working on. It made it obvious what was holding us back from the business we were trying to become. Once everyone was looking at the same numbers, we stopped arguing about whether we had a problem and moved straight to what to do about it.

Now, being data-driven only gets you a clear picture. It doesn’t tell you what to do with it. The job is to look at that picture, pick the one or two things that matter most, and then take a stance on that. “This is what’s going on. Here’s where the challenge or opportunity is inside of that. And this is the choice that we’re going to make to go attack that challenge or opportunity.”

This stance-taking thing is harder than it sounds, because before you can take a stance, you usually have to reveal something about your go-to-market motion that doesn’t look that great. When your new-logo number’s down, the instinct is to bury it in the appendix and lead with the more optimistic take on your numbers.

And I’ve watched plenty of smart leaders do exactly that. But the ones I trust, the bankable ones, do the opposite. They’re not afraid to put the not-so-flattering number right up on the screen, point at it and say, “This is what I’m worried about, and here’s my plan to go deal with it.” This can feel really vulnerable at first, but it’s how you get the whole room working on the problem with you instead of wondering whether you have what it takes to get the business where it’s trying to go.

And the best revenue leaders don’t just point out this stuff. They actually deprioritize the rest of the board deck to make sure the whole room focuses on the biggest challenges and the biggest opportunities.

They’re not afraid to say, “We sent you the materials in advance. Happy to answer questions on any of those materials, but if everyone’s okay with it, I’d like to spend 80% of our time together on these three issues, and I think it’ll maximize the time we have together today.” They’re trying to max out what Pat Lencioni would call ROMA: return on management attention.

That kind of prioritization and stance-taking is what makes you bankable. Your investors are rooting for you. They want to believe that you know what’s going on inside your business, and that you’ll make a good call about what to do next. And you can give them that confidence by using your Data Diet and getting yourself into a rhythm where simple, consistent reporting makes it easy to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what stance you should take about what to do next.

So that’s the work. Build the rhythm. Use it to find the one or two things that matter and have the nerve to say them out loud. And if you do that, here’s my prediction. What you’ll notice is that most of what you end up fixing isn’t high-level strategic stuff. It’s basic execution. It’s dropped balls, which is exactly what we’ll focus on in our final episode: the three moments of truth where deals are won and lost, and where great sales teams win by nailing the small stuff.