Good digital marketers know to value  output over the input. As a matter of fact, the input “hits” is a term that got the industry so much trouble that we don’t even call it that any more when we talk about impressions. Impressions, clicks, conversion rate, average sales amount, lifetime value of a customer are all inputs that go into the most important output: profitable revenue (ROI).  [Note, this can be over time (LTV) or transactional].

This accountability for output vs. input is not news to a good digital marketer.   Show me a media manager who drives towards inputs vs. outputs and I’ll show you one who will be looking for work, either because they get fired, their employer closes shop, or the agency they work for loses the client.

Let’s call this the Digital Sausage Principle: as digital marketers, we may analyze and optimize inputs like impression volume and conversion rate, but we know to measure and account for the outputs versus the inputs when evaluating success or failure. “How profitable is X?” is the modern translation of “is my sausage any good” (double-entendres notwithstanding.)

So how come, when we flip our digital marketing cap for the manager hat, we don’t do as good a job managing people by their outputs as we do with media? To begin to answer this question, let’s first define the problem. Without exception, any meaningful job at an advertiser, agency, or publisher (and most companies) will have a blend of four outputs:

1. Customers: what is their impact on the consumer/client/customer
2. Shareholders: what is their impact on revenue (short term, long term, etc)
3. (For managers): What is their impact on their organization?
4. Internal partners: what is their impact on their colleagues/peers?

I’ll go out on a limb to say that the four outputs above are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive: you mess up on any one of these and you will ultimately fail in your job, and if you get all of these right, you will succeed.

For my vegetarian readers:

If you are with me so far, then you will join me for some head scratching around why leaders and manager insist on holding direct reports, colleagues, and partners accountable for inputs versus these four outputs.  Now, here are examples of reasonable inputs:

1. Number of meetings
2. Sales close rate
3. Quality or quantity of internal or external presentations
4. SLA (service level agreement) or time-tracking adherence

Now, all these things are not only examples of inputs, they are highly likely to drive the right outputs.  However, they are not outputs, and as leaders we should resist the temptation to use them as measurements of success (much like “hits”).   You could easily have 10, 20, or 50 good inputs that might go into the four primary outputs. My observation: the larger the company and deeper the organization, the greater the number of inputs obfuscating the outputs.

How we know not to use inputs like these as accountabilities: it is possible to do all those inputs (whatever they are) and still fail at outputs 1-4; likewise, it is possible to avoid many of those same inputs for the right reasons (depending on leadership style) and still exceed at the outputs. In fact, sometimes you have to avoid executing reasonable inputs to get the right output (in media, that’s called optimization).

Leaders  are more likely to get what they want by holding themselves and others accountable for the outputs versus inputs – that’s called management by objective. And by doing so, we develop a culture of empowerment and creativity versus entitlement and inertia.

Plus, as a manager, it’s a heck of a lot easier to hold yourself, and your teams, accountable for four outputs vs. a squint-print scorecard of squirrelly inputs.

Popularity: 4% [?]