Clients love to see evidence of progress.

Prospects love to see proof of your results.

In both cases, your consulting firm can easily provide what they’re seeking through scorecarding.

Your Scorecarding Indoctrination

Remember jumping off the school bus and scampering home to show your mom the smiley face your teacher scrawled on your homework? (I have more memories of scampering home to dive into a bag of Oreos, but let’s go with the smiley face imagery.)

Those innocuous proto-emojis, hastily scribbled by primary-school teachers, are planting seeds that you can harvest into a healthy bushel of new business.

Since our formative years, we’ve all been rated, ranked, and reviewed based on concrete metrics – usually with numbers.

Standardized tests, university entrance exams, grade-point averages, annual income, and even body-mass index (which shows that for some of us the snacking habit happily outlasted school).

Since your clients measure and judge the world as much as you do…

Scorecarding is a habit worth embracing wholeheartedly

Scorecarding means keeping track of the benefits you generate for your clients.

The first consulting firm I worked for was brilliant at scorecarding.

We tracked everything we could think of: sales per foot of shelf space, profit per item, return on inventory investment, millimeters of dust on the shelves.

Then we would use that data to show prospective clients that we could increase sales, profit, and ROI. (Clients seemed oddly indifferent to dust.)

Concrete Floats to the Top

Imagine you turn on the weather channel and the serious-looking announcer intones, “A big blizzard will hit you tomorrow” then quickly moves on to tell you it’s warmer in Australia.

You flip to another station, where the sprightly meteorologist explains, “You can expect to see eight inches of snow by 6:00 p.m.”

The second forecaster earns your praise because his information is more concrete, he enables you to compare this week’s blizzard to last week’s dusting, and his sheer precision demonstrates superior depth of knowledge and experience.

If you had to contract for some weather consulting, which meteorologist would you choose? The latter one, of course.

Similarly, your clients are looking for a consulting firm that can point to concrete, detailed evidence of the value they produce.

What to Scorecard

Your clients’ ultimate result needn’t be the only metric you track—in fact, you may not highlight that result at all since it’s outside your control.

Instead, point your clients’ gaze to barometers that suggest progress.

Turn first to the leading metrics you’ve recommended in the “Indicators of Success” section of your Context Documents and proposals.

Even if your consulting firm focuses on qualitative, subjective issues far removed from profits and share prices, you can measure, track, scorecard and showcase results on a compelling scale clients will gobble up. (The success of personality tests like DiSC proves that.)

Share Your Scorecards

If you are actively consulting, you’ll experience more success by actively scorecarding.

Simple as that.

Your consulting firm creates value for clients, so measure it, track it, and show it off to the world.

What metrics do you (or could you) track with your clients?

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Text and images are © 2026 David A. Fields, all rights reserved.