The Only Three Sales Metrics That Matter
Sales is the only function in most companies where the executive team and investors can see the work happening in real time. Calls logged. Meetings booked. Demos run. Visible effort feels like progress.
And to be fair, activity solves a lot of problems. Ask a hundred people to buy something and two will say yes, even if you never tell them what you’re selling. It’s a law of averages.
But unchecked activity creates its own damage. When poor-fit products are pushed into the wrong markets, it burns relationships, erodes reputation, and forces companies to keep redefining their ICP. High activity with low conversion and low product-market fit isn’t growth — it’s a product looking for a market.
The Bias Toward Motion
Activity is easy to measure, so leaders love it. It gives them dashboards, noise, and something to celebrate. But motion isn’t the same as momentum. The sales floor full of frantic dialing might look healthy; it could also be hemorrhaging trust in the market.
Track activity, yes. Just don’t worship it.
The Conversion Layer
The next level of truth is conversion — how much of that motion turns into actual business. The elite reps I’ve led rarely top the activity charts. They move with calm precision. Think of them like poker players: they don’t play every hand; they know when to bet.
If activity is volume, conversion is judgment.
In a perfect world, every rep would achieve what I call the 1-1-1-1 ratio: one targeted company → one prospect call → one completed meeting → one activated customer for life. That’s sales utopia. It almost never happens, but it’s what we’re all chasing — trust so strong that every interaction compounds.
And that word — trust — is the hinge.
I once read about an experiment where someone offered strangers a ten-dollar bill in exchange for a five. Rationally, the ROI is obvious. Yet most people refused. No trust, no transaction. The same is true in B2B. The best product in the world can still fail if the buyer doesn’t believe the person selling it.
The Overlooked Metric: Quality of Sale
Not all revenue is good revenue. Every organization has deals that light up the scoreboard in Q1 and quietly destroy profit in Q3. “Quality” depends on context — buyer time, industry type, deal size, tenure, and measurement bias all play roles. Defining what quality means for your business is central to GTM design. It dictates your ICP, onboarding model, and renewal process.
When you treat every dollar as equal, you miss the unit-economics story: Which deals expand? Which churn? Which creates advocates?
If activity builds the pipeline and conversion fills the forecast, quality determines whether you’re building a company or just running a quarterly hustle.
The Leadership Lens
People focus on what they know you measure. If you celebrate raw activity, you’ll get motion. If you celebrate conversion alone, you’ll get shortcuts. If you celebrate only quality, you’ll slow down growth. The real art is balancing all three — knowing when to emphasize each based on where the business is in its maturity curve.
Putting It to Work
Activity: Track it to understand the revenue lifecycle and forecast velocity.
Conversion: Coach judgment — when to engage, when to walk.
Quality: Measure retention, expansion, and margin by rep. Reward sustainable growth, not one-quarter wins.
Across twenty-five years of leading teams, the pattern is clear: top performers rarely lead in dials or demos. They’ve simply cracked their own version of the 1-1-1-1 ratio — they’ve built trust, judgment, and process into a repeatable rhythm.
Activity fills the pipeline. Conversion fills the forecast. Quality fills the future!