It doesn't matter how fast or well you solve the wrong problem. It is always challenging in setting individual and team goals and compensation, especially when the results of the team aren't as easily measured as sales (business development, marketing, product management, internal audit...). Are your goals aligned with what matters to the company, or are they your goals because they're the easiest to track and measure?
For example, let's take a mature company who's board is focused on three things: growing cashflow, ROI and net profit. What should marketing be measured on? Oftentimes it's the total number of leads generated, without any quality criteria. Measuring marketing on quantity of leads can actually be harmful if it encourages marketing to generate leads that are a waste of sales' time. What about:
* The number of leads, but only from 'high quality' sources (referrals, 'contact me'...), and excluding low-quality sources (webinars, tradeshows...).
- These are just examples - what are your own hgh and low quality sources?
* The number of leads that get positively qualified by sales
* The revenue generated from the leads
* The cashflow, ROI and profit from the leads
Companies often don't measure marketing on these better metrics because, for example, they would need to update their reporting to track these metrics, or marketing resists measurement, or "that's not how we have ever done it here".
Another example is in customer service. How many companies measure, as key metrics, time per call, first call resolution and cost per call? Are those more important to your executives or less important than customer satisfaction and net recommender metrics? Is customer service viewed as a cost center, or an investment in making customers happy?
The closer you can align people and teams to the company's strategic goals (whatever they are), the more aligned and productive they will be, and you can stop paying them for the wrong results.
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