Why five, and why Monday
A weekly number is only useful if someone acts on it. Past a handful, nobody remembers last week's figure, nobody owns the trend, and the meeting turns into a tour of charts. Five is enough to cover the whole path from first contact to cash, and few enough to keep in your head. Robert Kaplan and David Norton made the same case to large companies in their 1992 Harvard Business Review article on the balanced scorecard, which "forces managers to focus on the handful of measures that are most critical."
“What you measure is what you get.”
Monday works because the whole week is ahead of you. There's time to move people, change priorities and chase what's stuck before it costs another week.
1. New leads, and how fast they got a reply
What to count: every new inquiry from every source last week and, for each one, how long it waited for a reply from a person. Show the count by source and list the slowest replies, not just an average.
What it tells you: whether demand is coming in, and whether you're wasting it. Plenty of leads with slow replies is a handling problem, not a marketing problem. In research published in Harvard Business Review in 2011, firms that tried to contact a web lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that tried an hour later. More on that in Speed to lead: the cheapest growth lever nobody fixes.
2. New qualified pipeline
What to count: the number and value of new opportunities created last week that meet your written definition of qualified. Not every conversation, only the ones that passed the bar.
What it tells you: what revenue looks like a few months out. If this number falls for several weeks in a row, the gap in revenue shows up later, when it's much harder to close. Watching it weekly gives you the warning early.
3. Deals won and lost, and why
What to count: deals closed last week, won and lost, with the value and a one-line reason for each. Include deals you closed out because they went quiet.
What it tells you: whether the pipeline is turning into revenue, and what's in the way. One lost deal is noise. The same loss reason three weeks running is a pattern you can fix: price, fit, a competitor, or a step in your own process. Before you act on a repeat reason, check it with the buyers: a win-loss analysis shows you how.
4. Cash collected against what's overdue
What to count: the cash that actually came in last week, next to the invoices that are overdue, oldest first.
What it tells you: whether revenue is real. Signed deals and sent invoices don't pay salaries. Overdue invoices are often an operations problem in disguise: a missing purchase order, the wrong contact, or work the customer doesn't think is finished.
5. Customers at risk
What to count: current customers showing warning signs: a complaint, a deadline you missed, fewer orders or less use, a key contact leaving, a renewal coming up with no conversation booked.
What it tells you: where revenue might walk out the door. In a small company, losing one good customer can undo weeks of new sales. It's also the number founders tend to look at only after the customer has gone.
Not sure which number to fix first? The free audit takes four questions.
Rules that make the numbers worth reading
- One written definition each. What counts as a lead, what counts as qualified, when a deal is won. If a definition changes, note the date, or the trend stops meaning anything.
- One owner each. The owner explains the number on Monday and says what they're doing about it. A number without an owner is decoration.
- The trend, not the snapshot. Show the last several weeks side by side. Single weeks bounce around. Direction is what matters.
- Ready before the meeting. The numbers are in place before Monday, not built during it. If someone spends Monday morning copying figures by hand, that's the first thing to fix. In a 2024 survey of 5,500 sales professionals, reps said 70% of their time goes on non-selling tasks.
- Taken from the record. Numbers come from where the work is recorded, not from memory. If the record can't produce a number, that's a finding too. You won't be alone: in a 2020 Gartner survey, only 47% of sales leaders and sellers said their organization had high-quality data.
Build it in an afternoon
You don't need new software. Start with a single page, even a shared spreadsheet, with five rows and a column for each week.
- Write the five definitions. One sentence each.
- Fill in the last six weeks by hand. It's slow once, and it shows you straight away where the data is missing or unreliable.
- Name an owner for each row. One person, not a team.
- Decide who updates it, and by when. Friday afternoon or first thing Monday.
Once the definitions have held steady for a month, automate what you can. Automating before then just produces wrong numbers faster.
Run the Monday review in 30 minutes
- Five minutes on the numbers. Each owner reads out their number and the trend. No discussion yet.
- Fifteen minutes on what moved. Pick the one or two numbers that changed most or are heading the wrong way. Ask why, and what would fix it.
- Ten minutes on decisions. Each issue ends with an owner, an action and a date. Next Monday starts by checking those actions.
If the review ends without a decision, it was a reporting meeting. Those can be an email.
A quick self-check
- Could you say last week's five numbers without opening anything?
- Is each number written down with a fixed definition?
- Does each number have one named owner?
- Can you see the last several weeks side by side?
- Are the numbers ready before the Monday meeting, not built during it?
- Does every Monday review end with owners, actions and dates?
When the numbers don't add up
If the pipeline number looks healthy and revenue still falls short, read Why your pipeline forecast is always wrong. If plenty of new pipeline comes in and little of it closes, Pipeline looks full and nothing closes walks through the diagnosis.
Want an outside read on which of your numbers to fix first? Start with the free audit. If you then want to build the fix yourself alongside other owners, there's the Cohort, starting mid-January 2027. If you'd rather have it built and run with you, there's the Executive engagement.
Works Cited
- "Gartner Says Less Than 50% of Sales Leaders and Sellers Have High Confidence in Forecasting Accuracy." Gartner, 12 Feb. 2020, www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-02-12-gartner-says-less-than-50--of-sales-leaders-and-selle. Accessed 28 Oct. 2026.
- Kaplan, Robert S., and David P. Norton. "The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance." Harvard Business Review, Jan.–Feb. 1992, hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2. Accessed 28 Oct. 2026.
- Oldroyd, James B., et al. "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads." Harvard Business Review, Mar. 2011, hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads. Accessed 28 Oct. 2026.
- "Salesforce Report: Sales Teams Using AI 1.3x More Likely to See Revenue Increase." Salesforce, 25 July 2024, www.salesforce.com/news/stories/sales-ai-statistics-2024/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2026.