The Big Themes:

• The trap of vanity metrics: certain statistics you hear all the time, like "we have 96% customer satisfaction," are not telling the full story. These metrics are easy to come by and make us feel good, but in the end they do not really help us.
• Metrics that actually matter: in a digital transformation, the stats that you need are those that tie back to business objectives. This means revenue improvements, cost reductions, and working capital improvements.
• Trust but verify: Raven Intelligence can help with choosing a vendor or partner by helping you verify the metrics you're hearing from salespeople. It's important to confirm the source of the stat, and its relevance to your business and goals.

The Big Quote: "You hear a statistic like 'on-time delivery.' But how is that defined? Because if on-time delivery is 96%, and it's based on a date that's moved eight times... Well, it's easy to have an on-time delivery for a moving target. And so in those types of cases, when you hear numbers like that, you always want to sort of peel back the onion."

 

This episode is sponsored by BMC Software.

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