The sales world has an unhealthy obsession with tracking and numbers. Dials, emails, meetings booked—if it can be shoved into a CRM field, someone’s building a dashboard for it.
But a lot of those “metrics” are basically the sales equivalent of counting how many times you went to the gym without checking if you actually lifted a weight. Impressive movement, zero progress. If you are using data as a dashboard, you need to be measuring what actually paints an accurate picture.
Take the classic activity metric: “Did you make 50 calls today?” Great. If you dialed 50 wrong numbers, congratulations—you’re now the world champion of wasted effort. Don’t even get me started about “talk time”, the stupidest measurement ever.
What actually matters? Things like:
- Pipeline quality. Not how big it is, but how many prospects actually have money, authority, and a pulse. Most pipelines have lots of fluff.
- Conversion points. Where do deals actually move forward, versus where you keep hearing “send me more info”?
- Engagement. Are prospects excited and leaning in, or are they silently praying the Zoom link breaks? Are you getting them to share their pain?
- Revenue efficiency. Did you win a deal, or did you basically barter your soul and three months of discounting to squeak it through? Not all revenue is equal.
Here’s an example on revenue efficiency. Years ago I was working with a VP of sales who was streamlining his sales department. They had over-hired in the past and needed to reduce the number of sales reps by about 20%. The business case for that objective made sense. The way they had gone about evaluating sales reps did not. Their team was geographically based, selling a product dependent on the number of subscribers they had in that specific market area. Changing the names and places, here was their initial analysis:
– Rep 1 (Mickey) was in Raleigh, and sold about $950K/yr
– Rep 2 (Michelle) based in Charlotte, sold about $1.2MM/yr
– Rep 3 (Mike) based in Greensboro, sold about $450K/yr
The company wanted to go down to two reps in the area, and RIF one of them. Easy choice right? Mike sells the least, so he has to go.
Here’s the problem, they were not measuring an element called “momentum”. Mike was working with a subscriber base one fourth the size of Mickey’s list. He was generating half the revenue Mickey was, but on one quarter of the opportunity, which means he was actually yielding twice Mickey’s output. In fact, if you considered that metric, he was also outperforming Michelle. He was the top yielding rep in that market.
Even better, if you expanded that measurement to the company nationwide, Mike was in the top 3% of reps across the country. I could pick Mike up and drop him into 97% of the other sales seats and increase sales! Yet Mike was on the initial “no brainer” cut list. All because a certain metric called momentum was not being considered.
The dirty little secret: the right metric is momentum. Are deals moving forward? Or are you just busy logging “touches” like a bored telemarketer with a clicker? You’re talking to a lot of people, great, but are they the RIGHT people? Are they the right people at the right companies?
Activity numbers make managers feel warm and fuzzy. But don’t confuse “busy” with “effective.” Because nobody’s hitting quota with a record-breaking number of unanswered voicemails or a nice healthy dose of client meetings where they are a professional visitor.
Track what matters. Ignore the vanity stats. And remember: sales is about winning business, not winning the “most calls logged” award at the next team meeting.
By the way, based on a better analysis, Mike was still removed from his sales position…..and promoted to the director of sales training so he could teach the other 200+ reps how to yield results the way he did in Greensboro.