May 12, 2026

What a Firm Should Stop Measuring

Scorecards tend to grow over time as someone asks to add one more metric, and rarely shrink, because removing a metric feels like admitting it was not worth tracking in the first place.

Signs a metric has stopped earning its place

It has not moved a decision in the last two review cycles. Nobody can explain, off the top of their head, why it is on the scorecard. It measures activity, emails sent, calls made, rather than an outcome that connects to actual business results.

Why activity metrics are the most common candidates for removal

Volume metrics feel productive to track and easy to improve by simply doing more of the activity, regardless of whether the activity is producing results. A scorecard dominated by activity metrics can show a busy quarter and a bad quarter as the same thing, which defeats the purpose of measuring in the first place.

A simple annual prune

Once a year, review every metric on the scorecard against the two questions above: has it moved a decision, and does it measure an outcome rather than raw activity? Anything that fails both should come off, freeing attention for the small number of metrics that actually inform what the firm does next.

A caution about removing too aggressively

Some metrics earn their place by providing early warning even when they have not yet triggered a decision, a leading indicator that has been flat because nothing has gone wrong yet, not because it is useless. Before removing a metric, distinguish between 'has not mattered yet' and 'cannot matter.' Only the second category is a genuine candidate for removal; the first deserves to stay as a quiet check even during a period when it is not driving action.

A short annual test for leading indicators specifically

For any metric kept on the leading-indicator justification, ask once a year whether it has ever, in fact, provided useful early warning, even if the warning never fully played out into a problem. A metric that has genuinely never given useful signal, even as an early warning, after several years of tracking is a much stronger candidate for removal than one that simply has not mattered yet this quarter.

Where this leaves a firm

None of this is complicated in principle, which is exactly why it gets skipped under deadline pressure. The question worth returning to before treating measuring marketing return honestly as settled is what a careful reader would actually notice if the firm got it right. On the point raised above under “signs a metric has stopped earning its place,” the answer is usually specific rather than clever: a metric that has not influenced a decision in two cycles is a candidate for removal. Firms that build this expectation into how they train new associates find it easier to sustain once experienced staff move on, because the standard lives in a documented habit rather than in one person's memory. The gap between a firm that talks about measuring marketing return honestly and a firm that actually practices it shows up over several quarters, not in any single engagement, and it tends to show up most clearly in the small, unglamorous checks that a client never sees directly but benefits from anyway.

It also helps to name, plainly, who is responsible for keeping this working once the novelty of a new tool wears off. Someone should own the point raised under “why activity metrics are the most common candidates for removal,” check it periodically rather than assume it stays true on its own, and be the person a colleague asks when a new situation does not fit the pattern described here. Put simply: an annual review against clear criteria keeps the scorecard focused and useful. That kind of ownership, named and specific, is a small addition to a firm's process, and it is usually the difference between a good idea that is followed for a month and a standard that actually holds up over a year of real client work.

None of this needs to be elaborate to be effective. A short, dated note in a shared file, reviewed at the next quarterly check-in, is usually enough to keep the responsibility from quietly disappearing when the person who first cared about it moves on to something else.

VIPMarketing Editorial