Seven numbers are enough for an owner's morning. Each one has something to compare against, a threshold at which to take notice, and a clear action if the number looks bad.
How a digest differs from a dashboard
You open a dashboard when you have time and a question. A digest arrives by itself at the same hour and answers a single question: do I need to step in anywhere today. That is why it has few numbers, and each one is chosen so you can act right after reading it.
There is no single standard for a morning digest, and we are not inventing one. The set below is our recommendation for a business that has advertising, leads, managers and payments, and you will choose your own composition by the same rules described in the next section.
How to choose a number for the digest
- It is clear what to do about it. If the number is bad and you do not know whom to call, it has no place in the digest.
- It is calculated the same way every day and from one source. If two systems give two values, first agree which one is the main one.
- A comparison sits next to it: without one, a number says nothing.
- The whole digest is read in five minutes.
Seven numbers for the morning
| Number | Where it comes from | When to take notice |
|---|---|---|
| New leads for yesterday by channel | CRM, forms, calls | Noticeably fewer leads than on the same day last week, or a whole channel has gone quiet |
| Payments and revenue for yesterday and month to date | Payment system, CRM | The month-to-date pace is behind plan |
| Conversion from lead to payment | CRM: payments divided by leads for the same period | Conversion falls while the number of leads stays the same |
| Stuck deals | CRM: deals with no movement for longer than a limit you set for your sales cycle | The number of deals and their total amount are growing |
| Response speed to new leads | CRM, telephony | Leads wait for an answer longer than your rule allows |
| Ad spend and cost per payment | Ad accounts and CRM: spend divided by the number of payments | Money goes out and no payments come in |
| Anything unusual in the last 24 hours | Comparison with the average for the same weekdays | A sharp spike or drop that has not happened before |
You set the threshold for each row yourself, based on your own funnel. We deliberately give no numbers such as "a normal conversion is 5%": they depend on the product, price and channel, and someone else's norm confuses more often than it helps.
What not to put in the digest
Twenty charts, monthly averages with no link to a day, numbers without a comparison, and metrics nobody reacts to. A good sign that a number is redundant is that in the last two weeks it did not lead to a single decision, and such a row can be removed at no loss.
What to compare with
There are usually more leads on Monday than on Sunday, so it is better to compare yesterday with the same day last week and with the average of the last four such days. For payments, add the monthly plan and show how much of it is already done, so in the morning you see both what got worse and by how much.
How to run the digest by hand for a week
- Name one person responsible for the digest. If everyone is responsible, nobody is.
- For each number, write the source and the formula in one line.
- Agree on the words: what counts as a lead and what counts as a payment. Departments often understand these words differently.
- For five mornings in a row, build the digest by hand and check it against what you see in the systems.
- Set a threshold and an action for each number: who does what if it goes out of bounds.
- Choose the time and place of delivery, for example a messenger or email.
- After two weeks, remove the numbers nobody reacted to.
When a manual digest breaks
The first cause is people: the owner of the digest goes on vacation and it stops arriving. The second is mismatched definitions: sales calls any phone call a lead, while marketing counts only a submitted form, and the numbers do not add up. The third is delays: data from the payment system arrives the next day, so a morning payment does not make it into the digest. The fourth is growth: the digest gradually gathers more rows until it turns into that same twenty-chart dashboard.
How the Second Brain does it
Brain has a Telegram digest. Its composition and alert triggers are tuned to the client's business. For one of our clients the morning digest arrives at 09:07 every day and replaces manual reports. You can also ask about any of the seven numbers in plain words in Telegram at any moment, and the agent will assemble the answer from the CRM, advertising, payments and tasks.
Case figures come from our own implementations. Your result depends on the quality and completeness of your data.
Still, it is better to start with a manual digest: if the numbers do not add up on paper, automation will repeat the mismatch faster. We wrote about how a one-off question to your data differs from a regular report in "Why BI reports don't answer the question every executive actually asks", and a comparison of a live analyst with an agent is in "Second Brain vs an in-house analyst".
Where to start
Start with a free audit: together we will decide which of the seven numbers you can already calculate automatically, and which questions your data cannot answer yet. Then 2 weeks of free data collection, connection on a plan, and a subscription from €349 a month.
