Would you rather have a thousand leads or ten good leads? How about a hundred candidates for your open position, or two perfect candidates? Do you want to create fifty logos for your customer’s rebrand or one great one?

In each of these cases, the answer is easy – no one wants quantity; we want quality.

What do you measure?

When you are evaluating your marketing and sales process, what do you measure? Most people count the number of leads, meetings, and proposals.

When you are evaluating your recruiting efforts, what do you focus on? The number of applicants?

When you manage the scope of your engagements with a client, do you limit the number of rounds of revisions?

If we want quality, why do we measure quantity?

Quantity is easier to measure, so we default to tracking quantity over quality. We do it because it’s straightforward and objective. Measuring quality involves a lot of subjective measures – it gets messy.

So we measure what we don’t want because we don’t want to do the work to measure what we do want.

 

Quantity measures hustle and drive, but quantity requires coaching.

Here’s the thing, sometimes we need to know that someone can “do the work.”

If we have a new business development person, we want to know that they can make the calls or connections to reach decision-makers. Without seeing the quantity, we don’t know if they are making an effort.

But once they prove they have the drive – you will both get better results if you slow down and do the hard work of thinking about what quality means. That might take some coaching, training, experimentation (e.g., A/B testing), and refinement.

But if you can get someone with drive and resilience who has a process that produces quality outcomes, what would that be worth?

Where do you see this dichotomy at work in your business? Where do you need to refine systems away from quantity and toward quality?