Activity Is Not the Number

Sales teams are rarely short of activity. Activity is not the problem. The problem is when busy starts standing in for the number, and nobody notices until the month is over.

A quota is a revenue number

At DMA a quota was stated in money. In 2022 it was $20,000 a month. Even when we paid outsiders to help build the team, the number was the thing rewarded: in 2021, when a sales consultant offered to help us hire and manage a salesperson, I offered him a monthly fee for three months and a bonus only if the candidate hit quota in the first quarter.

That is the easy part to design. The hard part is keeping a team pointed at it when the month is going badly. On the last day of March 2022, with the team short of quota, I wrote to a colleague:

Quotas are not being met and everything seems fairly kosher to them.

That sentence describes the real failure. Missing a number happens. Missing it while the team feels fine about it is a culture problem, and the leader has let it form.

The report has to end in an outcome

Daily reports are where activity hides. A report can list twenty things done in a day, every one of them true, and say nothing about whether anything was sold.

In June 2023 I asked for every daily sales report to end with the same five lines:

• Number of leads
• Today’s sales revenue
• Number of calls
• Other activities
• Number of deals closed

The activity was still there, but it now sat next to the result. Later that year, replying to a daily report, I sent back a single line:

Connected…and then what came out of it…

And in February 2024, when a report noted that a partner was asking why there had been no movement on getting one of our salespeople into discovery meetings, without saying what had been done about it:

You need to tell me how you addressed that situation…..that’s like advising me that the forest is burning.

A report that lists a problem is a notification. A report that says what was done about it is management.

Forecasts are promises

In May 2019 the forecast for DMA was $40,000 for the month and $5,000 for the first week. The week closed at $2,000. My email the following Tuesday was short: we did not hit the goal, here is what we closed, what is the number for this week?

That is all a missed forecast needs at first. Not an inquest, and not silence. The number, the gap, and the next commitment. A forecast that is never compared with the result stops being a forecast and becomes a mood.

Four years later the gap was larger, and so was the note. In May 2023:

Need to deliver results; DMA numbers down 20 percent instead of up 100%.

The same rule applies when I am the buyer

Lead sources sell activity too. In 2024 a comparison platform for agencies offered DMA a paid position in its digital marketing rankings, with traffic figures, screenshots from other agencies and a 50% discount for the first month. I asked for a 30-day trial; it would not offer one. My reply:

Lead volume doesn’t mean anything. Lead quality matters. But most importantly actual revenue driven from the campaign is the ultimate testament. And that too for our environment.

We passed. I was not saying the platform did not work for anyone. I was saying the only proof I would accept was revenue, in our business, and I had no way to see it before paying.

I hold a sales team to the same standard. Calls, connections and leads are inputs. They are worth counting because they predict the number. They are not the number.

What a miss should trigger

From my own emails, the useful response to a missed number has three parts:

1. State it plainly. The target, the result, the gap. No softening.
2. Ask what came out of the activity. If the activity was there and the revenue was not, the problem is conversion, qualification or offer, not effort.
3. Get the next commitment. A number for next week that will be checked.

What it should not trigger is a longer activity report. More evidence of being busy is not an answer to a revenue question.

Making that the standing response, rather than a conversation someone has once, is most of what changes when I run a sales team for someone else.

Related: Tuesday Mornings at 8:30 on the weekly sales training at DMA, and Postponing Again on deals that keep moving to next month.