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This Issue
Your sales activity is up and to the right. Why isn't your revenue?Sales leaders track activity because it's easy to count; but activity alone doesn't guarantee results. The research is blunt: 83 percent of the metrics on a typical sales dashboard can't be directly managed at all — and the ones that can are being managed by volume instead of quality. The ProblemIf your answer to a missed quarter is "more prospecting," you don't have an effort problem. You have a strategy problem. The pattern is everywhere. Activity capture has never been more exhaustive: every call logged, every email tracked. Leaders watch the counts climb and call it pipeline discipline. Then the quarter closes and the counts didn't convert. The producers feel it too. Salesforce's State of Sales survey of 5,500 sales professionals found producers spend 70 percent of their time on non-selling tasks, 67 percent don't expect to make quota this year, and 84 percent missed it last year. Record visibility into activity, falling results. That's not an activity problem. That's a dashboard measuring the wrong thing.
The Reframe
The research behind Cracking the Sales Management Code explains why the dashboard fails. The authors analyzed 306 metrics that real sales organizations track, and only 17 percent — the activities — can be directly managed. The rest, 83 percent, are objectives and results like win rate and revenue: outcomes you can influence but cannot manage. Most dashboards are built almost entirely from that unmanageable 83 percent, plus raw activity counts that confuse volume with quality. A count tells you a producer made 300 touches. It cannot tell you whether the touches work. The number that connects effort to results is the rate: meetings per hundred touches, opportunities per meeting, wins per opportunity. Rates are where coaching lives — a low meetings-per-touch rate is a messaging problem, and a low wins-per-opportunity rate is a discovery or qualification problem. More volume doesn't fix either; it multiplies the defect. The structural fix: stop reviewing counts. Review rates, per producer, per stage. The producer with the most touches is rarely the one with the best rate — and the one with a modest count and a high rate holds the skill the rest of the team needs. Volume amplifies whatever the rate already is.
The Solution
The Tool
Learn MoreInteresting resources to go deeper.
Book
Cracking the Sales Management Code
Jason Jordan & Michelle Vazzana, McGraw-Hill
The definitive case for the activities-objectives-results chain. The authors' analysis of 306 real sales metrics shows most dashboards are built from numbers no leader can directly manage — and lays out how to manage the ones you can.
Research
State of Sales, 6th Edition
Salesforce Research, 5,500 sales professionals
The selling-time and quota-expectation data anchoring this issue: 70 percent of producer time on non-selling tasks, 67 percent not expecting to hit quota, 84 percent missing it the prior year. Read Research →
Practice
The One-Producer Rate Audit
A 30-minute experiment
Pull one producer's last 90 days and compute the three rates: touches-to-meetings, meetings-to-opportunities, opportunities-to-wins. Before you look, write down who you think your best performer is. The gap between your answer and the rates is the audit.
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