Don’t Just Measure Results. Measure the Work That Creates Them.

What BI Dashboards Can’t Show You About the Performance That Drives Results

Key Takeaways

• Most companies are data-rich on results, but data-poor on execution. They can see what happened, but not how and why it happened.

  
  

• A new product launch at Verizon proved the point: one region’s consistent execution generated thousands of extra activations in a quarter — enough to materially impact revenue and potentially the stock price — while others with the same playbook underperformed.

  
  

• Elite athletes don’t measure only by the scoreboard. They track dozens of preparation metrics — training load, nutrition, film study — to ensure high quality performance is inevitable. Companies need additional insights to do this.

• GoalScore™ is the business equivalent of an athlete’s readiness profile. It’s a real-time Performance Health Index that measures execution, momentum, and engagement — the inputs that drive results.

• With GoalScore™, leaders gain the living pulse of performance, enabling earlier interventions, fairer talent decisions, and scalable replication of best practices.

Why Execution Visibility Is the Next Frontier in Performance Management

When I was leading teams counted in the thousands at Verizon — a Fortune 20 company at the time — I had access to more dashboards, reports, and KPIs than most leaders will see in a lifetime.

I could see everything the business could measure on paper: real-time sales for every store, quota progress for every rep, product performance by market, and operational KPIs sliced every way imaginable.

But for all that visibility, there was one thing I couldn’t see:

How well my people were actually executing the work that produced those results.

I could see what happened. I couldn’t see how it happened — or where we were leaving opportunities on the table.

The Verizon HUM Case Study: When Alignment and Execution Made the Difference

Hum was Verizon’s early connected-car product — a plug-in device and app that gave drivers features like vehicle diagnostics, roadside assistance, and location tracking. It was a brand-new category with huge growth potential if we could get it into customers’ hands fast.

We cracked the formula early: a clear pitch, a hands-on demo, and the right bundles to remove friction. We aligned every store leader and rep, and the results came quickly — 400 units in 3 days. Sustained, that’s 4,000 activations a month in our region alone.

If that performance was replicated across all 35 sales regions, as many as 420,000 net adds per quarter would have been generated — enough to shift quarterly guidance, change the investor narrative, and potentially move the stock price.

The playbook was available to everyone. The difference was execution. Some regions ran with it, but most didn’t.

For the next 10 months, our teams outsold the rest of the country combined — not because we had more or better resources, but because we aligned and executed better.

It was a huge missed opportunity, worth potentially hundreds of thousands of net adds — and the kind of momentum in a new product set that would have had an impact on Verizon's overall stock price.

The Hidden Gap (and How Market Share Masks It)

Hum wasn’t an outlier — it exposed a broader truth, that even in data-rich organizations, surface-level metrics can often mislead or hide gaps.

Take phone adds (new phone activations). On the surface, it’s a clean metric. In reality, it ignores market structure:

In low-share markets like California or Texas, just showing up often yields more new phone activations — with foot traffic providing more potential switchers.

In high-share markets like Pennsylvania or upstate New York, the “switcher” pool is much smaller. Hitting the same phone-add targets there demands sharper execution — proactive outreach, retention plays, upsell strategies — just to hold ground.

Judge both markets by the same surface number and you’ll mistake environment for excellence. You end up rewarding favorable conditions and penalizing disciplined execution in tougher terrain.

What leaders actually need is visibility into how those numbers were achieved — the behaviors, cadence, and coaching that make performance repeatable.

What I Wished I Had Then

If I could rewind, I’d want one platform that aligned our teams and leaders around the right objectives, resources, and best practices, but also:

• Measured execution as it happened.

  
  

• Collected feedback in the flow of work, not in stale surveys.

  
  

• Surfaced excellence and disengagement early.

  
  

• Put performance in market context so leaders judged fairly.

  
  

• Informed talent decisions on execution quality, not just outcomes.

Hum would have been a national success story, not a patchwork.

Introducing the Goalster GoalScore™

The GoalScore™ is a real-time Performance Health Index that captures the inputs that actually move the scoreboard: on-time actions, coaching participation, contribution to shared goals, relevant learning, peer collaboration, and a steady cadence of progress week after week.

Instead of asking, “Did we win?” GoalScore™ answers:

“Are we doing the right work, the right way, consistently enough to make winning inevitable — everywhere, not just in pockets?”

What Elite Athletes Measure Constantly — And What Most Companies Miss

As a former world-championship-level athlete, I never judged my readiness by the medal count alone. The podium is a lagging indicator. What really determines the podium is everything measured before race day.

On any given week, high-performance athletes track things like:

• Training Load & Intensity: session volume, interval quality, stroke rate, wattage.

  
  

• Technique & Film Review: breakdowns of form, split-by-split analysis, error patterns.

  
  

• Recovery & Readiness: sleep duration, sleep quality, HRV, resting heart rate, soreness.

  
  

• Nutrition & Hydration: macros, timing, hydration strategy, body composition trends.

  
  

• Coach Interactions: goals for the cycle, mid-week adjustments, micro-feedback.

  
  

• Consistency & Cadence: completed vs. planned sessions, streaks, taper adherence.

  
  

• Competition Simulation: time-trial execution vs. plan, starts/finishes under fatigue.

If race-day time is off, the question isn’t “Why didn’t we win?”

It’s: Which input slipped, when did it slip, and how do we correct it this week?

Corporate life rarely works this way.

Many professionals “train” in the dark (or mistake working for training). They can coast between quarterly reviews hoping the scoreboard looks good — with little visibility into the daily habits that predict the score.

GoalScore™ completes the picture for business the way analytics completes it for sport. It turns preparation behaviors into visible data — so leaders and individuals can adjust before the result.

Here’s how that translation looks in practice:

• Training Load → Action Completion & Cadence: Did we complete the planned work on time and maintain weekly rhythm, or did we cram at the end of the quarter?

  
  

• Film Review → Content & Reflection: Are reps actually reviewing playbooks, watching call breakdowns, logging reflections — and does it correlate with better calls the next week?

  
  

• Coach Interactions → Check-ins & Coaching: Are managers coaching weekly, documenting focus areas, and closing the loop — or only reacting when something breaks?

  
  

• Recovery/Readiness → Work Sustainability Signals: Is workload balanced, or are we burning out high performers who will crater next month?

  
  

• Nutrition/Timing → Enablement Consumption: Are people consuming the right enablement at the right moments (pre-launch, pre-call, post-mortem), or are we dumping content with no uptake?

  
  

• Consistency/Taper → Streaks & Momentum: Are we stacking small wins daily, or living on end-of-month heroics that don’t scale?

Imagine if every employee operated with an athlete’s discipline:

They’d know whether they did the reps, reviewed the tape of their performance, took the coaching onboard, and maintained the required disciplines — and so would their leaders.

That’s what GoalScore™ delivers: not surveillance, but a window into how those results are driven, and whether the processes needed to deliver optimal results are being executed at all levels.

The Practical Impact for Leaders

With GoalScore™, a leader isn’t just reading results — they’re seeing the living pulse of execution across the org, daily. Enabling them to:

• Intervene earlier. Catching dips weeks before results slip.

  
  

• Replicate success. Scaling best-practices and behaviors across all departments.

  
  

• Coach with precision. Diagnosing skill vs. engagement vs. process.

  
  

• Allocate resources intelligently. Supporting where execution is high but results lag; reinforcing discipline where results mask weak execution.

  
  

• Make better talent calls. Rewarding sustained execution and high performance, while addressing the drivers of underperformance.

  
  

Why This Matters Now

In hybrid and remote environments, you can’t “manage by walking the floor.” Without structured execution data, you’re managing assumptions — and assumptions break under pressure.

GoalScore™ doesn’t replace the scoreboard; it completes it. Just as elite athletes track training, recovery, and film — not just race-day time — GoalScore™ tracks the disciplined work that makes performance sustainable.

From Guesswork to Knowing

Back at Verizon, sometimes I guessed our execution was world-class; other times I wasn’t sure. Without this additional performance data, guessing is all any leader can do.

With GoalScore™, you don’t guess. You know — and you can act now, not next quarter.

Because the real question isn’t just “Did we win?”

It’s “Are we executing in a way that makes winning inevitable — across every team, every time?”

With Goalster GoalScore™, you finally have the answer — and the mechanism to turn a few regions’ excellence into company-wide momentum that shows up in thousands of incremental activations, tens of thousands nationally, and the kind of quarterly impact that investors actually notice.

If you’d like to talk about how Goalster can help you or your organization achieve your most important goals, click here to set up a time to discuss your team's goals.

About the Author

Darren Webster is the Founder and CEO of Goalster, a technology and services company dedicated to helping people and organizations execute better, perform at their best, and achieve significant outcomes.

A former world championship-level athlete for Australia in sprint kayaking and a former Verizon executive who led large-scale teams, Darren brings deep expertise in performance enablement, leadership, and execution.

His mission with Goalster is to provide the support, training, and accountability people and organizations need to turn their ambitions into measurable results.