Sales Activity Metrics - The Reddest of all Herrings? Why Your Sales Metrics Are Wrong.
- Matthew Earle
- Apr 9
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 20
Why Your Sales Metrics Are Wrong.
Why Your Sales Metrics Are Wrong. Sales teams are being overwhelmed with dashboards and reports — calls made, emails sent, meetings booked. From my own experience, I've had to log all my activity into a CRM, send it to the SLT via email, and — unbelievably — duplicate it again in a separate spreadsheet when someone deemed it worthy.
But are these sales activity metrics the reddest of all herrings? Activity alone doesn’t drive revenue. Insight does.
The most common issue we see across B2B sales functions? They're measuring the wrong things. Or measuring the right things in the wrong way.
Activity feels good. It’s tangible. But without insight into buyer behaviour, it’s just noise.
I recall one sales team having 50+ opportunities sitting in their pipeline. After a quick review, we found that most of them weren’t real — no active problem, no urgency, no decision-making timeline. Just ‘maybes’ that gave a false sense of progress.
Instead of celebrating activity, we should help teams focus on problem-led insights:
What’s holding the buyer back?
Do they actually have a business-critical problem?
Why now?
When your sales strategy starts with insight, not activity, you stop chasing shadows and start winning consistently.
Forget focusing on the metrics — ensure your sales teams are maximising their chances by asking the right questions, to the right people, framed in the right way.
Solve. Sell. Succeed.
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