Sales leadership · 2 min read

Selling Comes First. Then Count It.

A full calendar and a long report can both feel like progress. A handful of numbers tell you whether it was.

I first encountered the rule in Kellogg’s Mastering Sales program: in a salesperson’s week, selling comes first and everything else comes second. I agree with it. In practice it is only half the job. A plan built around selling tells you what someone intended to do. It does not tell you what the selling produced.

First, make the job selling

In 2022 I was helping a company plan its sales hiring. Its founder wanted an account manager next, someone to keep the existing deals moving. I wrote back:

By definition: a Salesperson closes opportunities. an Account Manager manages existing accounts.

And then:

In ineffective environments, a salesperson’s job can include the responsibility to generate more leads, however, I am proposing a sales person does what a salesperson should do, which is sell.

Lead generation belongs to marketing. Account management belongs to account managers. If a salesperson’s week is full of both, selling cannot come first, however the calendar is arranged.

Then count it

Once the job is selling, the next question is how you find out whether it is happening. My answer, over the years at DMA, has been to keep asking for numbers instead of narrative.

Outcomes, not activity. By 2023 I was getting long daily reports: emails worked, leads contacted, calls held, what each prospect had said. Useful, but I could not see at a glance whether the day had moved anything. On 12 June 2023 I asked for six lines to be added to every report:

Number of Leads:

Today’s Sales Revenue:

Activities and Calls:

# of Calls:

Other Activities:

Number of Deals Closed:

What the calls actually produced. A rep reporting a day of calling got this reply in September 2023:

Please identify what the responses were on the calls 1. Not interested: 8 2. Voicemail: 15 3. Scheduled Calls: 6 4. Number Disconnected: 4 Etc.

Thirty-three calls is activity. Six scheduled calls is the part that matters, and the rest tells you whether the list or the pitch is the problem.

Only the deals that are real. In June 2024 I asked a senior rep to list his major deals with the status, the next task to close each one, the value, the probability of closing and the expected close date. Then I narrowed it:

I don’t need anything until it is in your 80 percent plus bucket

A pipeline report that includes every conversation is a list of hopes. The ones above 80 percent are the ones the business can plan around.

Enough of it. Volume still matters. In May 2024, reading the week’s reports, I wrote that deal flow on the DMA side needed to triple at the minimum. What that spring looked like is in Postponing Again.

What I still ask for

The format has changed over the years. The questions have not. How many leads came in, how many real conversations happened, which deals are genuinely close, and how much revenue closed. Everything else in a report is context for those four answers.

Those four questions are the reporting line I set up first in a sales leadership engagement.