What Daily Actions Should Every Relationship-Focused Agent Take Without Exception?
There is a pattern in the lives of the agents featured in Inside Secrets that becomes impossible to ignore once you see it. These are professionals with seven-figure incomes, ninety-plus percent referral rates, and businesses that run, in Kim Ward's words, "in the background, without me." None of them got there by doing more. Every single one got there by becoming more deliberate about what they did, and who they were being while they did it.
Before any business activity, a relationship-focused agent must spend time in deliberate inner work. This is not metaphor. It is operational necessity. Gina Martinelli named her central drift pattern with precision: she had a habit of waiting. Waiting to be good enough. Waiting to feel qualified before reaching out. This waiting cost her relationships, referrals, and years of momentum she never recovered. The antidote was not accountability software. It was a daily practice of examining what she called the harsh voices inside and consciously choosing her higher self before engaging her day. The PrivateWork Self-Coaching system, a twenty-prompt algorithm practiced daily, allows a professional to identify where they are operating from unconscious pattern versus deliberate intention. No outreach. No client contact. No social media. Before any of it, the inner game must be set.
The Before Unit governs how an agent maintains relationships with their sphere of influence before a transaction occurs. This is where the referral business lives. And it requires a daily action: some form of meaningful contact with someone in the sphere. This does not mean a marketing email. It means a personal outreach, a text that acknowledges a specific life event, a handwritten note, a brief call with no agenda except connection. Cyndee Haydon took this further. After years of operating a transactional business with sixteen-hour days and a thirty percent referral rate, she restructured her practice around relational investment. She began hosting Sunday dinners with past clients at local restaurants, not as marketing, but as genuine community-building. Within one year her referral rate climbed by thirty percentage points. By the time she wrote her Inside Secrets chapter, her referral rate was approaching ninety-five percent.
The 5-6-7 Conversation is a specific dialogue structure designed to move a conversation from surface exchange to the level where emotional connection and referability occur. Amit Inamdar describes his first BroVance meeting as pivotal: he worked through a 5-6-7 conversation on himself, drilling down to his own emotional core, his actual reason for being in the business, his genuine why. This internal clarity became, in his words, the biggest driving force to get through everything that needed to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. The daily discipline: practice one genuine 5-6-7 conversation. The habit is not about technique. It is about building the reflex of going deeper, asking the next question, staying with someone long enough to find out what actually matters to them.
Joe Stumpf teaches a specific approach to affirmation that distinguishes it from generic positive thinking. The phrase "I love the thought that..." anchors a desired future state to present reality without requiring the speaker to pretend that reality is already here. Amit Inamdar credits this language discipline with helping him shift his relationship with money, his relationship with scarcity, and his relationship with his own capacity. The daily action is two minutes of anchored language, spoken aloud, written in a journal, or voiced in the morning practice. Not inspiring slogans. Specific statements about what is becoming true.
Every relationship-focused agent needs a scoreboard that tells the truth, and it must be reviewed daily. The metrics that matter, conversations that went deeper than transaction, referrals received, referrals given, relationship touches made, are not tracked by most CRM systems automatically. They require a daily intentional review: what did I do yesterday that moved my relationships forward? What did I avoid? Jim Urban, a Denver-based agent with thirty-one years in real estate and sixteen years as a By Referral Only member, built his entire practice around what he calls being All In. His daily practice is not complicated: he shows up completely to each item on his schedule, reviews his commitments each morning, and refuses the drift pattern of partial engagement.
What Weekly Structure Creates Genuine Momentum Rather Than Just the Feeling of Productivity?
There is a distinction that Kim Ward learned the hard way after sixteen years in the business: the difference between a jar full of sand and a jar with rocks in it. If your life is a glass jar, the big rocks, your health, your most important relationships, your deepest commitments, must go in first. The problem is not that sand exists. The problem is when you fill the jar with sand first and then wonder why there is no room for anything that actually matters.
Kim Ward describes the morning she saw this clearly. Her daughter Ashlie called at seven in the morning in labor. Kim was getting dressed to meet with sellers on a probate listing. She kept getting ready, until she looked at herself in the mirror and stopped. She called her assistant, went to her daughter, and watched her son-in-law support Ashlie through childbirth. The sellers, as it turned out, did not want to pay commission anyway. Kim now owns that house as one of her twelve rental doors. Big Rocks First is not just a scheduling philosophy. It is the decision that, made consistently every week, determines what kind of life a practice is actually building toward.
The Four Protected Categories
All lasting change begins on the inside and works its way out. A week that does not have protected time for the morning identity practice, the journaling, the PrivateWork self-assessment, the reading and reflection that keeps a professional operating from their highest version rather than their habitual one, that week will be reactive from the first phone call. Cyndee Haydon describes her shift in exactly these terms: she stopped starting each day with a to-do list and started starting each day with a question: at the end of today, how do I want to feel? The structure of the entire day followed from that question, not from an inbox.
The sphere touches, the personal calls, the handwritten notes, the meaningful outreach to someone in the Top 150, must be scheduled, not squeezed in. Jim Urban describes his system as touchpoints going out like clockwork on the Client Experience Timeline. Not when he got to it. Clockwork. The metaphor is precise: a clock does not run on motivation. It runs on structure. The Before Unit activity that produces a referral-based practice is not inspired spontaneity. It is protected weekly time that happens whether or not the week is otherwise falling apart.
The initial consultations, the listing presentations, the buyer consultations where the 5-6-7 conversation method is practiced with full presence. These are the high-value, irreplaceable activities that only the agent can do. They cannot be delegated. They cannot be compressed. They require the best hours of the best days, not the leftovers after the email is answered and the administrative tasks are caught up.
Jim Urban rides one hundred fifty miles every week with his cycling group in Denver, never missing a Saturday regardless of the market or the season. Shelley Cunningham, after years of working all-real-estate all-the-time, trained for a two hundred fifty-kilometer cancer ride in pouring rain and found that her capacity for client empathy deepened through the hospice volunteer work and physical training she finally allowed herself. The agents in Inside Secrets who produced the most durable results were, without exception, also doing something outside the business that regenerated them. This is not self-indulgence. It is maintenance of the instrument.
What Metrics Matter Beyond Volume, Transaction Count, and GCI?
The agents in Inside Secrets are remarkable not because of their transaction counts. What makes them remarkable is what they stopped measuring, and what they started measuring instead. Cyndee Haydon doubled her business over four years while cutting her working hours dramatically. The metric that tracked that outcome was not GCI. It was referral rate, which she watched climb from thirty percent to nearly ninety-five percent while her enjoyment of work, her relationship with her husband, and her physical health all improved simultaneously. GCI followed. It was the trailing indicator of something more fundamental that was growing underneath.
The percentage of business that arrives through referrals and repeat clients rather than through cold marketing. The Asking For Referrals methodology distinguishes between three populations: the fifteen percent who refer without being asked, the fifteen percent who will not refer under any circumstances, and the seventy percent in the middle who will refer if asked in an intelligent, articulate way. A referral rate below fifty percent is diagnostic, it means the system is leaking somewhere in the Before Unit, the During Unit, or the After Unit. A referral rate above eighty percent means the relationship infrastructure is working.
The Before Unit system is built around the Top 150, the specific people who know you, like you, and trust you enough to introduce you to someone they care about. The metric that matters is not how many contacts are in the database. It is how many of those contacts had a meaningful interaction with you in the past ninety days, not a newsletter, not a postcard, but a personal connection that registered in the relationship. Volume of contacts is sand. Depth of connection is rocks.
How many consultations in the past month included a genuine 5-6-7 conversation, one where the client reached a level of self-disclosure that produced a profound experience? This is a metric almost no agent tracks because it requires honest self-assessment rather than a data pull. But it is the upstream driver of referrals, client satisfaction, and the kind of trust that makes a professional irreplaceable. Amit Inamdar's movement from significant debt to a seven-figure income in four years was not driven by volume. It was driven by a deepening of the quality of every client conversation.
The four referability habits, show up on time, do what you say, finish what you start, say please and thank you, are behavioral commitments that either hold or erode the entire referral infrastructure. A weekly honest assessment of how consistently these four were honored is more predictive of next year's referral rate than any production report. When they slip, the sphere notices before the agent does. The sphere just stops referring, without explanation, and the agent attributes the decline to the market.
Shelley Cunningham describes the one-dimensional life she had built before BroVance: all real estate, all the time, all day, every day. The hospice volunteer work she eventually took on, sitting with people in their final days, practicing the same listening and empathy skills she had been developing in client consultations, made her a measurably better agent. A sustainable practice tracks whether the professional's energy is regenerating week over week, or whether it is being consumed faster than it is being restored. An agent running on depleted reserves cannot be fully present in a 5-6-7 conversation.
What Conversion Standards Should Exist in a Referral-Based Practice and How Do You Measure Them?
The formula matters because it makes visible where a practice is actually breaking down. Most agents who are not producing the results they want believe they have a lead generation problem. When Joe spent two days in the field with two high-performing agents from his coaching program who had gone from six-figure incomes to struggling, he found the same thing each time: the lead generation system was working. They had leads. What they did not have was the skill to convert those leads into appointments, appointments into contracts, and contracts into closings. The system was not broken at the front. It was broken in the middle.
In a referral-based practice, a referred lead arrives differently than a cold lead. The person calling has already been told something about you by someone they trust. The trust transfer has already begun. A consultation rate below seventy percent on referred leads is diagnostic, something in the initial contact is failing to honor the warmth that the referral created. The standard Joe teaches: every referred lead should convert to an in-person or video consultation with a genuine agenda, the 5-6-7 conversation, the discovery of what is most important to this person, and the crafting of a specific strategic plan tailored to their values.
When the consultation is conducted properly, with See-Through Vision, a curious heart, a complete 5-6-7 conversation, and advice wrapped inside the client's stated priorities, the consultation-to-contract rate should be high. Joe Stumpf's benchmark across the BRO community: seventy percent or better. When it falls below that, it is almost never a market problem or a price problem. It is a trust problem. The client did not reach the level of self-disclosure that makes the professional's advice feel like the logical expression of their own values.
The four referability habits apply here with full force: show up on time, do what you say, finish what you start, say please and thank you. A contract-to-close rate that falls below ninety percent in a referral-based practice is a signal that the promise made in the consultation is not being kept in execution. The client experience during the transaction is either deepening the relationship or eroding it. There is no neutral ground.
Of every transaction that closed in the past twelve months, how many produced at least one introduction to someone in the client's network? The fifteen/seventy/fifteen principle establishes that most agents are leaving the seventy percent entirely unactivated. A practice with a high close-to-referral rate has a self-sustaining pipeline. A practice with a low one is perpetually restarting from scratch. The deconstructed transaction journal is the measurement tool: after every closing, document the arc, how the lead arrived, what happened in the initial consultation, and whether an introduction has been requested and made.
What Communication Approaches Still Work in the Current Market and Why?
The communication approaches that still work in 2025 and beyond share a single structural characteristic: they begin inside the client's experience rather than inside the professional's agenda. Every approach that is gaining effectiveness, not losing it, is built on the same foundation: the professional disappears as a salesperson and becomes, in the client's perception, a trusted advisor who is genuinely curious about what matters most to them.
The most durable communication approach in the By Referral Only system is the ascending question structure: What is important about _____ to you? asked progressively, seven times, starting from the client's surface answer and moving upward through layers of increasing depth. This approach works in any market because resistance is psychological, not informational. Carl Jung's insight that resistance is unconscious, rooted in fear and the unknown, applies as powerfully in an AI-disrupted, information-saturated market as it did in any previous cycle. Clients today arrive with more data than ever and are no less afraid. The 5-6-7 dissolves resistance not by arguing against it but by taking the client somewhere more important than their fear, to the actual reason they want to make this decision, the value beneath the stated goal, the love or freedom or security that a home or a loan represents in the context of their life. When that level is reached, the professional's recommendation becomes the logical expression of the client's own stated priorities, and the resistance disappears without having been argued away.
The truth-telling methodology taught in Lead Conversion, building and delivering a personal manifesto that tells the authentic story of the professional's own experience, fears, breakthroughs, and convictions, works in the current market because it is the exact opposite of what AI-generated content produces. Automated systems generate information. They do not generate confession. The manifesto approach works because it demonstrates that the professional is willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of what is genuinely important. In a world of carefully managed personal brands, radical authenticity is the scarcest and most compelling signal available.
The Communication Mastery system, Be the Client, Be With the Client, Clarify, Real Commitment, Consequence Them, Encourage, Empathize, Truthing, Wanting For, Step Over Nothing, Love Them, Let Them Go, works because it provides a complete vocabulary for what a client might need at any given moment. A professional who has internalized all twelve does not script their conversations. They navigate them, reading what the client needs in this specific moment and meeting it precisely. Clients cannot articulate why they trust this person more than the last three agents they interviewed. They just know that in this consultation, they felt seen, heard, and genuinely advised.
What Approaches Are Functionally Dead and What Was Their Fatal Flaw?
The approaches that are functionally dead in a referral-based practice were never really about the client. That is their shared fatal flaw. They were about the agent's need, for leads, for control, for the appearance of professionalism, for the comfort of not having to risk a genuine conversation. The market has simply made this flaw visible in a way it was easier to ignore when transaction volume was high enough to paper over it.
The drip campaign built on automated, one-size-fits-all content, the market update email, the seasonal postcard with no personal connection, the check-in text that reads identically to the one sent to one hundred fifty other people, is functionally dead because clients now receive so much automated content that their brains have developed extraordinarily efficient filters for it. The fatal flaw was always transactional intent masquerading as relational investment. The goal of sphere contact is not to be remembered when someone is ready to buy or sell. The goal is to be the person whose name surfaces naturally in conversation because the relationship is genuinely alive. Automated drip sequences serve the first goal and undermine the second.
The listing presentation built around statistics, market data, and competitive differentiation, glossy, professional, systematically organized to overcome objections, is functionally dead not because the information in it is wrong but because the sequence is backwards. It leads with the professional's credentials and plan before it has discovered what the client actually wants. It speaks to the neocortex while the client's decision is being made by the mammalian and reptilian brains. The fatal flaw is confabulation: agents who have delivered a hundred listing presentations believe they know what clients need to hear. They deliver the presentation they would find compelling, to clients who have entirely different values, fears, and priorities.
The scripted response to commission objections is functionally dead because it treats the commission question as an information gap when it is almost always a trust gap. A client who trusts their agent completely does not ask about the commission in a way that requires defense. The fatal flaw was answering the question that was asked rather than hearing the question beneath it. Step Over Nothing, Approach Ten in the Communication Mastery system, is the corrective: you just said something about my commission and I'm curious what you meant by that. That opens the real conversation. The scripted defense closes it.
The agent who has committed to a referral-based practice and then fills spare time with cold calling, door knocking, and purchased lead follow-up is not supplementing their system. They are signaling to themselves and to their sphere that they do not believe the system works. Cold prospecting produces the feeling of productivity, calls made, doors knocked, leads logged, without producing the compounding effect that relationship investment produces. An hour spent deepening one relationship in the Top 150 produces more durable business value than an afternoon of cold outreach. The agents who prove this in Inside Secrets are not outliers. They are the demonstration that the system works when the dead approaches are abandoned and the living ones are practiced without exception.
How Should an Agent Measure Their Visibility, Not Just Online Presence, But Presence in People's Minds?
There is a question that cuts closer to the real visibility problem than any analytics dashboard can answer: when someone in your sphere has a real estate conversation at a dinner table this weekend, a friend mentions they are thinking of selling, a colleague asks who to call, does your name surface in their mind? And if it does, does it surface with enough specificity and warmth that they feel confident saying it out loud?
The Asking For Referrals framework identifies three populations in any sphere: fifteen percent who refer without being asked, fifteen percent who will not refer under any circumstances, and seventy percent in the middle who will refer if approached intelligently. The visibility question is: of the seventy percent, how many of them could right now describe what you do specifically enough to make a credible introduction to someone they know? If the answer is that most of them know you are in real estate but could not give a specific, compelling reason why someone should call you in particular, not just any agent but you, then online presence exists but mind-share does not.
The most honest measurement question is: in the past thirty days, how many people in my Top 150 had a conversation in which my name could have come up, and did? Not how many people received my newsletter. Not how many people opened my email. How many people, when someone in their world mentioned real estate, thought of me specifically? A warm introduction where the referral source has specifically advocated for you, told someone why you specifically, is evidence of genuine mind-share. A soft introduction where someone says I know a guy in real estate is evidence that database presence exists but mind-share does not.
Jim Urban built four hundred eighty videos that generated fifteen to twenty transactions per year, not because he had a large following, but because the people who watched them felt they knew him before they met him. His visibility was not broad. It was deep. People who encountered his content encountered a specific, recognizable person with specific values, a specific community, a specific way of being in the world. When they were ready to transact, the relationship had already begun. The depth-over-breadth measure asks: of the people who have seen me most recently, how many of them encountered something specific enough to update their understanding of who I am and what I stand for?
The contentimonial, Joe's distinction between a testimonial describing your competence and a contentimonial telling the full story of what it was like to go through something significant with you, is the highest form of mind-share measurement. When a past client can tell a detailed, emotionally specific story about what happened when they worked with you, what they were afraid of, what you did, how they felt when it was over, you have achieved the kind of mind-share that no amount of social media activity can manufacture. The measurement is simple: ask a trusted past client to describe you to a friend who has never met you. Listen to what they say. If they describe your production stats, you have transactional presence. If they tell a story, you have mind-share.
What Is the Right Way to Ask for a Referral: The Psychology and the Exact Language?
The referral ask that works is not an ask at all in the conventional sense. It is an invitation extended from the interior of a relationship that has already been established, and the psychology of why it works is inseparable from the sequence of events that preceded it.
The Five Mindsets That Must Be Present First
Not interest, not intention, but commitment to a referral-based practice as the non-negotiable foundation of how business is built.
The ongoing interior awareness that every interaction is either building or eroding the conditions that make a referral natural.
Specifically the four behavioral habits that create referability: show up on time, do what you say, finish what you start, say please and thank you. Without all four in consistent practice, asking for referrals is asking to borrow trust that has not been deposited.
Recognizing that reluctance to ask is almost never about the relationship and almost always about the agent's own anxiety about rejection or being seen as needy.
A well-framed referral invitation allows the referral source to do something meaningful for someone they care about. The discomfort of asking is the agent projecting their own discomfort onto the client rather than reading the relationship accurately.
The Orchestrated vs. Unorchestrated Ask
Research embedded in the Asking For Referrals framework shows that a well-orchestrated introduction increases the conversion rate of a referred contact by fifty percent compared to an unorchestrated one. This single insight changes the entire psychology of the referral ask: the goal is not to collect names. The goal is to orchestrate a specific introduction that serves both the referral source and the person being introduced.
If you know anyone who might need an agent, I'd love for you to pass my name along. This puts the entire burden of the introduction on the referral source, gives them no script for how to make it, and produces the soft reference, I know a guy in real estate, rather than the warm, specific advocacy that actually generates a conversation.
Is there someone in your world right now who is thinking about making a move? Someone you genuinely care about who deserves the same kind of experience you had? This focuses the referral source's attention on a specific person rather than the abstract universe of everyone they know. Then: here is exactly what I would love for you to say when you introduce us. And then you give them the words, a sentence or two that conveys the specific value you delivered in their transaction, wrapped in your client's own language about what mattered most to them.
The Three-Part Invitation Structure
I want you to know how much I valued the trust you placed in me when we went through this together. This is not flattery. It is the genuine naming of what the relationship produced, and it invites the client to reconnect with the experience, with the story, with what it felt like to be served well.
I'm building my practice entirely on people like you, people who care enough about the people in their lives to make a real introduction, not just mention my name. This positions the referral not as a favor to the agent but as an act of genuine care toward the person being referred. The referral source is not doing the agent a favor. They are doing their friend a favor by connecting them with someone they trust.
When you introduce me, here is what I would love for you to say... And then you offer specific language drawn from the client's own 5-6-7, their words, their values, the specific story of what mattered most in their experience, so that the introduction feels authentic to the referral source and lands with warmth and specificity on the person receiving it.
What Is the Wrong Way to Ask for a Referral and Why Does It Feel Natural to Do It Incorrectly?
The wrong way to ask for a referral is to ask for it as if it were a transaction. And the reason it feels natural is that the agent is scared, and fear makes every person reach for control, for a system, a script, a technique that promises to produce a result without requiring the vulnerability of a real relationship.
Joe Stumpf gives this phenomenon its most precise name in Lead Conversion: confabulation. The mind acts as if it knows something while not actually doing it. Every agent who has been in a training session on referral generation has heard the instruction to ask for referrals. They nod. They understand. They even agree. And then they go back to their practice and do not ask, or ask in ways that produce awkwardness rather than introductions, and they attribute the failure to the ask rather than to the conditions that were not present when the ask was made.
The Three Compounding Errors of the Transactional Ask
Anyone who might need an agent is everyone and no one. The referral source's mind goes blank because there is no frame to organize a useful answer. A well-framed ask focuses attention: Is there someone in your world right now who is thinking about making a move? The words right now activate current awareness. Someone in your world focuses attention on actual relationships rather than a theoretical universe of possibilities.
The subtext of a generic referral ask is: my pipeline is empty and I am hoping you will help fill it. Clients are not wrong to read this. It places the relational burden on the client, they are being asked to solve the agent's business problem, rather than inviting them to do something genuinely meaningful for someone they care about.
The referral ask made at closing, the moment when the client's attention is on the transaction that just completed rather than the relationships in their life, is a referral ask made before the relationship has fully integrated the experience. The DRIFT methodology names this as one of the fifty ways a professional drifts from their highest self: the drift toward harvesting before planting, toward treating the relationship as a resource rather than a source.
Why It Feels Natural
The Asking For Referrals framework names the interior obstacle precisely: fear. Specifically, the fear of being seen as pushy, as self-promotional, as the stereotype of the agent who only calls when they need something. An agent who is afraid of seeming pushy either does not ask at all, leaving the seventy percent entirely unactivated, or asks in a hedged, apologetic way that signals discomfort: I hate to ask, but... if you know anyone... The apology in the framing tells the client that the agent believes asking is inappropriate. And if the agent believes it is inappropriate, why would the client believe otherwise?
The Linguistic Error Most Agents Never Notice
Amplifier Two in the Asking For Referrals system names a specific error: using the word service instead of the word help. Research on the language of referrals shows that help activates the emotional, relational brain. Service activates the transactional brain. An agent who says if you know anyone who needs my services is asking to be evaluated as a vendor. An agent who says if there is someone in your life I could help is asking to be trusted as a person. The difference in a single word reflects an entirely different relationship with what the work is actually for.
What Should an Agent's Weekly Scoreboard Include and What Should It Never Include?
The weekly scoreboard is not an accountability tool. That framing produces exactly the wrong relationship with the metrics, because it turns the measurement into a performance rather than a diagnostic. A scoreboard that is used to prove something creates the incentive to track the numbers that look good rather than the numbers that tell the truth.
The scoreboard Joe Stumpf teaches through By Referral Only is a truth-telling instrument. Its purpose is not to celebrate good weeks or to shame bad ones. Its purpose is to reveal, with enough honesty and enough frequency, where the system is healthy and where it is leaking, so that the professional can make specific adjustments before a leak becomes a pattern and a pattern becomes a permanent condition.
What the Scoreboard Must Include
Relationship touches made to the Top 150, personal and specific, not automated. How many people in the sphere had a genuine interaction with you this week that registered in the relationship? Not how many emails went out. How many people felt, at the end of the interaction, that you had been thinking about them specifically?
Consultations conducted with full 5-6-7 presence. Not meetings attended or calls completed. Consultations in which the client was invited to a genuine level of self-disclosure and the professional delivered advice wrapped inside the client's stated values. This is the activity that converts time into trust in the A+T+T=M formula.
Referrals received and referrals given, both directions. The agents who generate the most referrals are often the ones who give the most referrals, who have developed the habit of noticing when someone in their world could be served by an introduction and making it without expecting anything in return. Tracking both reveals whether the referral ecosystem is active or dormant.
Integrity commitments honored. Of the specific things promised this week, to clients, to colleagues, to yourself, how many were kept without exception? The four referability habits are binary: either you showed up on time or you did not. Either you did what you said or you did not. The scoreboard that tells the truth includes this, honestly, every week.
Inner work completed. Not because spiritual development is measurable in a useful way, but because the inner work is the upstream condition of all the outer work. A week in which the inner work was skipped is a week in which everything else was running on reserves that were not being replenished.
What the Scoreboard Must Never Include
GCI. GCI is a lagging indicator that reflects decisions made weeks or months ago, not the health of the system right now. Tracking GCI weekly produces the anxiety of a metric that cannot be moved by any action taken today, which is exactly the wrong relationship to have with a weekly scoreboard.
Transaction count. Same reason. Transactions are the fruit of relationship investment made months earlier. Tracking them weekly is like checking whether the seeds you planted this morning have produced fruit yet.
Any metric that rewards volume over quality. The scoreboard that counts calls made without asking what was said in those calls, that counts activities without distinguishing between activity that compounds and activity that merely keeps the professional busy, is a sand-filling exercise. It will always look full. The jar will never have room for rocks.
Comparison to others. The scoreboard is a conversation between the professional and the health of their own system. The moment it becomes a comparison to the top producer in the office, to last year's numbers, to what the coach said the average looks like, it stops being a truth-telling instrument and becomes a judgment tool. Judgment is not useful. Diagnosis is.