Slides from a CFO Summit on Leading and Lagging Indicators

Just a quick post to share the slides of a presentation on leading, lagging, and predictive indicators that I gave at the recent Foundry CFO Summit.

• It starts with a discussion of the importance of leading indicators, particularly as we head into an uncertain business environment.
• It discusses go-to-market funnel and how leading indicators are basically up and lagging ones are down.
• I observe that we’ve spent 30 years trying to get marketers to focus down-funnel, so we should care before suddently saying, go worry about names or responses.
• We discuss whether you want to use a metric for prediction or management.  You can’t really pick both.
• It concludes by suggesting an ICP re-evaluation that’s both qualitative (which use-cases should be more compelling in the new environment) and quantitative (which prospective customers look most like our existing successful ones).
• The last point begs an interesting riff on what we mean by successful, which is far more of a greased-pig question than most realize.

The slides are here on Google Drive.  Thanks to Brian Weisberg for inviting me.