# Ten excuses for not using the business metrics you already have

- Link: https://jcody.com/blog/business-metrics-that-matter/
- Published: 2026-02-11T09:00:00-05:00
- Author: Jeffrey Cody

If you want a quick read on whether a team uses its data, listen for the excuses.
I have heard every one of these, and I have used a few myself.

The question underneath all of them is simple: **are you being productive, or just
very busy?**

 1.  **“Traffic is up.”** Up to what? Traffic that never turns into a conversation 
     is a vanity number.
 2.  **“We hit our lead goal.”** Leads by volume, or leads that become customers and
     stay?
 3.  **“No budget until sales close more.”** Sales will close more when marketing can
     show which leads are worth chasing.
 4.  **“Nobody has time to pull the data.”** A weekly hour with one clean report beats
     a quarterly scramble.
 5.  **“The web person is slammed.”** Then stop asking for ten reports and ask for 
     the three that matter.
 6.  **“More content will win.”** More of what works will win. More of everything is
     just noise.
 7.  **“The dashboard covers it.”** A dashboard shows what happened. It rarely says
     what to do next.
 8.  **“Sales knows which leads are good.”** Sales has strong opinions. Treat them 
     as hypotheses and test them.
 9.  **“Cost per lead looks fine.”** Cost per lead says nothing about the value of 
     the customer on the other end.
 10. **“The board is happy.”** Today. Boards like forward-looking answers, and you 
     cannot give one without the numbers.

## What to do instead

Track leads and customers by value and retention, not just volume. Connect the data
from first click to invoice using common keys. Test a few channels early, then cut
the ones that do not pay. And when your gut and the numbers disagree, run the test.

## The 2027 mentality

Most of the old excuse list is about effort: nobody has time to pull, join and read
the data. That is exactly the work AI is good at now. Going into 2027, the question
is no longer “can we afford an analyst?” It is “what would we change this week if
we could ask our own data a plain question and get a straight answer?” Start there.
Keep a human in the loop, and keep the receipts.