SX Metrics
Find the one stage that's capping you
The short version
SX Metrics scores the six stages every customer moves through: Plan, Engagement, Enquiry, Conversion, Retention, Operational Excellence. Each stage gets a score out of ten. The stages run in order, so a weak stage early on caps everything after it. Fixing the earliest weak stage releases the most. You’re not chasing six numbers at once. You’re finding the one that’s holding the rest back, then the next. Score yours, find the constraint, and you’ve turned a vague “we’re stuck” into a specific place to push.
Why this matters
You can’t fix what you can’t see.
Most owners run on two kinds of numbers. Vanity ones, followers, likes, website visits, that feel like progress and change nothing. Or none at all, just a feeling that things should be further along. Both leave you guessing. And guessing, under pressure, means you pour effort wherever it’s loudest, not where it counts.
I’ve sat with owners doing everything right and still stuck, and almost every time the problem wasn’t effort. It was that nobody could point to where the business was stalling. More leads won’t help a business that can’t convert. A better close rate is wasted on a business nobody enquires with. Without a map, you can’t tell which is which, so you work harder across the board and the needle barely moves.
SX Metrics is the map. Six stages, scored, so the gap stops being invisible.
That’s the difference between a busy business and a growing one. Not more effort. A place to put it.
What SX Metrics actually is
Here’s the model. It’s built on one fact most metrics ignore: a customer moves through your business in a fixed order, and each stage depends on the one before it.
The six stages, in sequence:
- Plan: do you know where you’re going and what you’re selling?
- Engagement: are the right people finding you?
- Enquiry: is your message turning attention into conversations?
- Conversion: are those conversations turning into signed work?
- Retention: do clients stay, come back, and refer?
- Operational Excellence: does the work get delivered without depending on you?
Each gets a score out of ten. Red (0 to 3) means blocked. Amber (4 to 6) means it needs work. Green (7 to 10) means it’s holding.
Now the part that changes how you act on it. Because the stages run in sequence, the earliest weak one caps everything downstream. Picture water through six pipes end to end. The narrowest pipe sets the flow for the whole run, and the pipes after it sit idle, with nothing arriving to work on. Widening any pipe after the narrow one does nothing. If Engagement is red, a brilliant Conversion stage has almost nothing to convert. Fix Conversion and you’ve polished a pipe downstream of the blockage. Nothing moves.
So SX Metrics doesn’t ask you to improve everything. It asks one sharper question: where’s the narrowest pipe? Find it, widen it, and flow increases across the whole business, often without touching anything else.
This is why six chosen stages beat a dashboard of forty. They map cause to effect, in order, all the way to enterprise value. Vanity metrics tell you something happened. SX Metrics tells you where to push.
How to score yourself: the build
Twenty minutes, six stages, a pen. Each step leaves you with a number or a decision.
Map your business to the six stages
For each stage, write the one number that best represents it right now:
- Plan: is the direction documented? (yes / partly / no)
- Engagement: leads or new contacts per month: ______
- Enquiry: real enquiries per month: ______
- Conversion: % of quotes/proposals that become work: ______
- Retention: % of clients who repeat or stay: ______
- Operational Excellence: jobs/decisions per week that can't move without you: ______
If a number doesn't exist, write "don't know". That blank is itself a finding.
Artifact: six numbers (or honest blanks).Score each stage out of ten
Turn each into a Red/Amber/Green and a rough score out of ten. Use the simple test: Is this stage working, needing work, or blocked? Green 7 to 10, Amber 4 to 6, Red 0 to 3. Don't agonise, first instinct is usually right.
Artifact: six scores with a colour each.Find the constraint
Read your scores in order, top to bottom. The constraint is the earliest Red or Amber, not the lowest, the earliest. An upstream Amber beats a downstream Red, because everything after it is capped anyway. Circle it.
Artifact: one named constraint stage.Set the next three moves
Take the constraint, then the next weakest stages moving down the sequence. For each, write the number that's 10% better in 90 days. Fix them in order, and expect the gains in the later two to show only once the constraint clears. You're not fixing the whole business. You're widening the narrowest pipe first, then the next. (This is the sprint from The Drift, now aimed at the right target.)
Artifact: three stages, three 90-day targets, in order.Set the review rhythm
A score taken once is a snapshot; scored on a rhythm, it's a control panel. Put a recurring review in the calendar, monthly is plenty to start. One question: did the constraint move?
Artifact: a scheduled review with one question.You now know where the business actually stalls, which gap to fix first, and how you’ll know it worked. That’s the whole game.
What if…
"I don't have numbers for some stages."
Normal, and the blanks are the first finding. A stage you can't measure is a stage you can't manage. Often the first sprint is simply making one number visible.
"My weakest stage is the back end, not sales."
Good, that's exactly what the model is for. Plenty of businesses pour money into Engagement when the real constraint is Operational Excellence or Retention. The sequence keeps you honest about which.
"Everything's amber."
Then trust the order. Work the earliest amber first; lifting it tends to lift the ambers behind it, because they were partly capped by it.
"I'm new / pre-revenue."
Then Plan and Engagement are almost certainly your constraints, and that's where the model says to start. You can't optimise a Conversion stage that has no enquiries reaching it yet.
"Isn't this just a sales funnel?"
A funnel measures the path to the sale and stops. SX Metrics keeps going, through Retention and the operations that deliver the work, because that's where most of the real value, and most of the gaps, actually sit. You don't need a funnel. You need a foundation.
Proof it works
The model earns its keep by pointing effort at the right stage.
A multi-venue hospitality group launched a new niche website and did $1 million in sales inside 90 days: the right people, the right message, a site that converts. In another case, rebuilding the customer journey on a new site lifted conversion by 400%, same traffic, the constraint moved. In another, web-form submissions tripled in eight months once the enquiry stage was unblocked. Each time, one stage was capping the rest; widening it released the flow.
Different businesses, one move each time: find the stage that’s capping the rest, and widen it.
Your next move
If you can feel the business is stuck but can’t name where, that’s the gap SX Metrics closes, and you can close it in twenty minutes.
The Constraint Audit is this model, scored for you: answer for each stage and it returns your six scores, your colours, and the three to move first. No sales call, no pressure. You tell it straight, you get it straight back.
Find the narrowest pipe. Everything else is just effort looking for a target.
Find the stage. Lift it. Prove it.
About the author. Antony Loomans writes for The Deliverators on the measured systems that turn demand into revenue. This guide is part of the s× metrics series.
Find it. Own it. Make it pay.