The number is a rearview mirror.

He finished the year at the top of the leaderboard.

I want to tell you about that rep, because the part of his year that mattered is the part nobody checked.

A piece of national business landed in his territory. A contract negotiated far above him, by people he had never met, signed for reasons that had nothing to do with him. The revenue booked to his number because of where the customer’s locations happened to sit. On paper it was a phenomenal year, and the next year’s expectations were set off the back of it.

He leaned into the top spot. I want to be fair about that. Reps should enjoy their years. The failure was underneath, where the work was.

The pipeline work was not there. The activity was not there. You could set his past efforts beside his current ones and read the next chapter already on the page. The deal had changed his number. It had not changed his work.

The next quarter came and went with no change in either. He was still number one. So was the quarter after that. Three straight quarters, and the board kept calling him the best rep in the region.

People tried to tell him. His manager raised it in one-on-ones, more than once. His senior manager raised it. I raised it myself, on a visit. Every one of those conversations ran into the same wall, and the wall was the leaderboard. It is hard to hear a warning when the board says you are winning.

His answer never changed. He was sure something else would come in.

It always does. That sentence is worth sitting with, because it is a belief, not a plan. And his own scoreboard was the evidence for it. Something had come in, the biggest something of his career, and it had required nothing from him.

When the new year came, the contract revenue was last year’s story. The pipeline and the deals that four quarters of work should have built were not there, because the work had not been there. The pressure built. He did not have the results to keep his seat.

Why does a strong number tell you so little?

Because it is a reading of the past, and it arrives late.

I read that year on two registers. The outcome register is what the board says: closed revenue, pipeline, coverage. The behavior register is what a sales rep actually did this week that builds the next board. On the first, he was winning for four straight quarters and then failed without warning. On the second, he was failing the whole time. The pipeline neglect showed in the first quarter. The flat activity showed in the second. Nothing about the ending was sudden.

The behavior register had the truth a year before the outcome register did. It usually does. The lag in his case was four quarters, and by the time the board told the truth, the time to fix the work had gone.

A pipeline coverage ratio reads like the first register. It looks like a forecast because it points forward, but it is a count of what is already on the board. Somebody’s work put those deals there, or something else did, and the ratio alone does not say which.

I do not have a ratio to give you, and I will not make one up. A number I could not trace to something I have seen would be the mistake this story is about.

Bill Walsh, The Score Takes Care of Itself, 2009

Walsh coached football, a sport where the score is on a board for everyone to see, and he put those words on the cover of his book. Where he pointed his attention is the point.

There was another rep on that leaderboard that year. She finished in the top ten, well below him. Her year was built differently. She had a cadence of her own: behaviors she had found to work, named, and run on purpose, over and over. Nothing on her line that year had landed by geography.

The board ranked him above her. Read on outcomes, that was correct. Read on behavior, it was exactly backwards. The next year, with the contract revenue gone, he fell off the board and then off the team. She finished in the top ten again, and the year after that. She is still there.

Thirty-plus years carrying a number, and I have never once learned from the board what a rep did this week. Here is the line I keep coming back to: the scoreboard is a rearview mirror. The behavior is the road.

1. Read the outcome register, and say it is late.

Write the coverage number down. It is real. It is also a reading of work already done, which makes it a reading of last quarter’s habits wearing next quarter’s name.

2. Find the mechanism behind every deal on the board.

Refuse the lazy word. Relationship, timing and instinct end the sentence early. Write how each deal actually got there: who opened it, what you did to move it. Nobody audits a win, and a win nobody has audited is where a referral engine you did not build hides.

3. Ask the behavior question every week, and answer it yes or no.

Did I run the pipeline work I said I would? Not whether the quarter looks good. Whether the work ran.

4. Read the two together.

A big number with an empty tally is a rep waiting for something to come in. A thin number with a full tally is an outcome that has not caught up yet. If it never catches up over a long enough stretch, you have evidence the work itself was wrong, and you can only say that because you kept the tally.

Run this.

The two registers, run on your own pipeline. One page, three columns, twenty minutes late on a Friday, the same slot every week.

1. Step 1. Left column: write the coverage number. Whatever your organization uses. Put today’s date on it. This is the outcome register, and it is late.
2. Step 2. Middle column: one line per deal, saying how it got on the board. Who opened it and what you did to move it. If the only line you can write is “it came in,” mark that deal and come back to it.
3. Step 3. Mark each deal built or arrived. Built: something you did, and could do again, put it there. Arrived: geography, a contract negotiated above you, or somebody else’s referral engine.
4. Step 4. Right column: the tally. Of the pipeline work you set out to run this week, how many times did you run it? Count it as yes or no, separately from how the deals went. Nineteen of twenty-three tells you the work is installed. Eight of twenty-three tells you it is not, whatever the board says.
5. Step 5. Read across the page. Strong number, empty tally: ask what is coming in behind it. Thin number, full tally: keep going and give the outcome time. Strong on both: write down why, so you can do it again.

What it changes.

1. Time. Twenty minutes on a Friday replaces a surprise at quarter end. The behavior register shows the gap quarters before the board does.
2. Opportunity. Sorting built from arrived tells a manager which part of the board can be repeated and which part was luck of geography. Only the first part is a system.
3. Compensation. Pay follows the board, and the board reads the lag. The rep in this story was paid on a number that told the truth four quarters late. A manager who reads the tally sees the risk while there is still time to change the plan.

The short version.

1. A pipeline coverage ratio reads like an outcome-register number: it counts what is on the board, not what built it.
2. The behavior register is the pipeline work a sales rep actually ran this week, counted yes or no on Friday.
3. The board reads the lag. In the story above the lag was four quarters, and the leaderboard outranked every warning.
4. I have no universal ratio to hand you and will not invent one. I have a page you can run on your own pipeline today.

Who on your team is doing the pipeline work the board has not caught up to yet?

If a manager you know is staring at a strong number this week, send this to them.

The steps for reading a pipeline coverage ratio, written out as a free reference, are here: frontlinetoforecast.com/pipeline-coverage-ratio

No theory. No highlight reels.

This essay ran as edition 20 of Frontline to Forecast, the weekly newsletter. One issue a week, published here on the Friday, then emailed and posted to LinkedIn the same morning. Same piece everywhere. Get the next one. Disagree with it? Reply to any issue, or find me on LinkedIn.