Why "Vanity Metrics" Aren't the Problem — Your Strategy Is

Tiffany Gonzalez

Founder, Bombyll

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Every GTM post-mortem starts the same way: someone pulls up a dashboard full of MQLs, activity counts, and pipeline-coverage ratios, and declares the data "dirty." It isn't. The data is usually fine. What's missing is a strategy specific enough to make that data mean anything.

The diagnosis everyone skips

Vanity metrics get blamed because they're visible and easy to distrust. But a metric is only "vanity" in the absence of a strategy that defines what good looks like. MQL volume is vanity if you haven't defined your ICP tightly enough to know which leads should convert. Activity counts are vanity if you haven't mapped which activities actually correlate with revenue in your specific motion. The metric isn't the problem — the undefined strategy behind it is.

What vanity metrics actually tell you

When a team over-indexes on activity counts and MQL volume, it's usually a symptom, not a cause: nobody has agreed on the 1-2 levers that actually move revenue for this specific business, at this specific stage, with this specific customer. In the absence of that clarity, teams default to counting what's easy to count. More calls. More leads. More touches. None of it is wrong to track — it's just disconnected from an operational truth about what drives valuation.

The real question

Before touching a single dashboard, ask: if this metric doubled tomorrow, would anyone be able to say why revenue changed? If the answer is "not really," you don't have a measurement problem. You have a strategy problem wearing a measurement costume.

A framework for finding the real bottleneck

We start every engagement with a full diagnostic, mapping the customer journey and isolating the 1-2 friction points actually constraining growth — not the ten things that feel broken, the one or two that are. That means shadowing calls, sitting with the team, and letting the data prove initial assumptions wrong. Only once that's clear do we decide which metrics are worth building a dashboard around.

Where this leads

Strip the vanity metrics, and what's left is usually a much smaller, much more useful set of numbers — tied directly to the handful of decisions that determine whether the company hits plan. That's the difference between a scorecard and an operating system.