Why you should focus on trackign Opt In Activities

Definitions:
Opt in activity - an activity where success is not clearly defined. For example, a salesperson may have a certain territory. Is he successful whether he made $100k in sales, $200k, $1 Million? It's tough to say.

Opt out activity - an activity where you have to opt out in order to not compelte. For example, someone who has been scheduled for 10 meetings needs to opt out in order not to succeed in the activity. It is clear if the individual misses two meetings that he has not succeeded fully.

It is useful to make a distinction in every business on which activities are opt in versus opt out activities. Why?

The reason is that it is often times easy to see whether someone is completing an opt out activity or not. Has the proposal been turned in, has the email been sent, etc. What probably is not being tracked in your company, and is often much more important, are the opt in activities that have no clear success indicators. These are the activities that every business should narrow down on and make sure that they take into consideration.

By the way, how do you track opt in activities? You track them by benchmarking other employees and figuring out what is good performance. You figure it out by tracking out analagous industries or by performing the activity for a week or two seeing how you perform and adjust from that.

Remember, opt out activities are probably doing fine in your business (unless it is incredibly disfunctional), the opt in activities, though harder to track, are the activities that really drive your business.